How Does Hotel Internet Marketing Work?

Last August 2008, the Prophis eResearch conducted an in-depth study on consumer behavior when it comes to booking hotels online. The research involved 433 American consumers and it aimed to determine how much influence user-generated content, reviews, video, and other social media influenced their buying decisions. In addition, it also tried to explore how much impact meandering search engines and other websites had on their opinion of the hotels.

In essence, the research body discovered that while people still very much value the feedback of their family and friends (it ranks number 1 in terms of influencing their hotel booking), social media comes in second. Offline and online, this proves that word-of-mouth is the top trusted source of decisions. Online, hotels can take advantage of features such as “forward to friend”, e-newsletters, and reviews to enhance their brand image and boost profitability.

There are specific steps they can implement in their online hotel revenue management promotional strategies. Among these are:

• Web Copy – some hotels stop their website efforts after the initial site has been set up. It is important to continue updating the website with press release, news feeds, and other interesting info to keep consumers interested. This can drastically help increase RevPAR and hotel sales.

• Keyword Research – any internet marketer will tell you that research should be the foundation of any hotel online sales strategy. This is because promoting your site using the wrong keywords is just pointless.

• Alt Tag Placement – each web page needs to be appropriate alt tags for search engine optimization

• Meta Tag Placement – some hotel revenue managers underestimate the value of placing proper meta tags on the website. Relevant and original meta tags have been cited as one of the top reasons why certain websites rank highly on the search engine results page. The structure of the meta-tags will be discovered by search engine spiders and when it is found relevant, it will be ranked as such.

Hotel revenue managers can benefit greatly from the hotel online marketing trend if they come up with effective yield management strategies.