Successful hotel marketing plans consist of a balance of paid media, owned media and earned media. The 5 key steps for hoteliers to follow when creating a hotel marketing campaign are to create a compelling brand, highlight your key value propositions, identify your target markets, activate your channels, and measure results. Visit our blog to learn more about how to implement a hotel marketing plan in 2023.

The best way to promote your hotel is to ensure you’re getting in front of travelers during their traveler journey in all stages, including: dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, and sharing. Travelers visit a multitude of websites during this journey, so it’s important to be present on digital marketing channels like search engines, metasearch engines, websites, and more, to encourage bookings.

Marking your hotel online does more than just allow your property to reach more travelers. A strong online presence helps your hotel brand stand out from the competition. A strong strategy proves long-term value by allowing you to fully own your guest experience from the very beginning – before they even check in – by establishing rapport, offering upsells, and remarketing those guests for repeat business in the future. By using Cloudbeds Amplify hotel marketing solutions you can benefit from done-for-you marketing services run by experts so you can focus on running your business and delivering a memorable guest experience.

Local search, or local SEO, involves optimizing your property’s Google Business Profile to strengthen your presence in local search results. Ensuring your business information is accurate and up-to-date influences your overall authority as a credible business (as deemed by Google). This, in turn, helps boost your ranking across search engines, directories, apps, and data aggregators across the web.

Though both are types of search engines, to distinguish the two:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes:

• Bidding on keywords that travelers type into the search
• If a bid is won, your website’s SEM ad shows up in prime placements on the search engine results page’s (SERP) ad space

Metasearch engines:

• Pull in rates and availability directly from your PMS
• Create a list of options for online users to compare and book
• Pull in and compare a list of rates from both hotels and OTAs

Social media channels are effective at attracting potential guests to your property and building brand awareness. See our article, ‘10 ideas for your hotel’s social media marketing strategy in 2022,’ to learn more about which social media platforms you can use to build your property’s social media presence.

When it comes to measuring the impact of your digital marketing efforts, data is your best resource. It’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and utilize data analytics to measure things like conversions, hotel revenue generated, occupancy rates, Return on Investment (ROI), bounce rates, site traffic, and more.