Running a hotel is a demanding venture that requires you to invest a lot of energy and become a Jack-of-all-trades sort of multitasker that can handle complaints and strike big deals with prominent players in the field of tourism – all within the same day.
Of course, you’d need some help to make this happen, but the gist of it is – you have to assume an outgoing and vivacious persona to impress both your potential business partners and your customers alike.
Now, when it comes to the creative aspects of this, how you’re going to build your company’s brand is entirely up to you. That said, there are still some strategies that you need to employ in order to channel these ideas and solutions of yours in an efficient way.
In this article, we’re going to talk about these strategies and list a couple of essential ones that you cannot afford to miss out on. The great thing about these is that they work no matter what sort of hotel business you’re running. So, you can rest assured that if you follow these, you won’t be making a mistake.
Here’s the deal.
Set up a website
Whether you’re selling fruits and vegetables under an awning in a small village in the middle of nowhere, or running a multi-national global company, setting up a website is an absolute must.
Since so much commerce and branding is realized through social media nowadays, missing out on this massive market as a business owner would be a crime.
Indeed, pitching your products, or in this case – your services to your potential and existing customers is way easier if you have a well-established and user-friendly website.
Also, don’t forget to optimize it for mobile devices as more and more sales are completed via tablets, iPads, and other similar contraptions.
Get involved with SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) goes hand in hand with setting up a website.
What SEO does for a business is propel its web pages and other online assets toward the top of the search engine priority list. So, when someone types in ‘best hotels in Melbourne’, for example, your landing pages will pop up first. (That’s if you’re actually from Melbourne, of course.)
The interesting and potentially tricky thing with SEO, though, would certainly be its complexity, which seems to be growing on a daily basis. That said, provided you put in extensive efforts and take some time out of your day to learn about it, you can get pretty far on your own.
Of course, if you don’t have the time or the willingness to do this, you can always hire an SEO company to do this part for you. If you’re from Australia, GWM Adelaide, for example, represents one of such businesses.
The important thing is to get on board the SEO bandwagon this way or another because it can truly mean the difference between making it big on the hotelier market or falling short of your projected growth rates.
Find authority sources to get recommended
Whether it’s through elaborate guest posts or by contacting these authority sources yourself, it’s highly recommended you find someone with respect in the field, so to speak, to put through a good word about you.
While promoting your own reports of satisfied customers is always a good idea, having someone else highlight the qualities of your business is marketing on a completely different level.
Get in cahoots with travel agencies
Other than online advertising, it’s important to pay attention to niche-specific marketing strategies that you can pull off.
As a hotel-based business owner, the folks you want to get in cahoots with as soon as possible would surely be travel agencies.
These companies deal with recommending various hotels to the people who approach them, so you can rest assured that if a travel agency likes you – you will have a steady stream of customers coming your way every season.
Organize social media accounts
One of the most potent free tools for advertising your business that virtually anyone can use and have success with would certainly be social media platforms.
The thing is, it’s fairly easy to get your message across to a wide audience of followers via these platforms. If you have an established brand already and a decent number of followers, you can even mount social media campaigns and attract even more potential customers.
Also, more customers means having a larger number of leads, which then translates to – more sales.
Since there are many social media platforms out there nowadays, you can always get someone to manage your hotel’s social media accounts, but even if you do this, you will be paying just one person to cover a large potential field of customers – so it does pay off fairly well in the long run.
All in all, as challenging as running a hotel is, if you put in the effort and employ the aforementioned strategies, you are sure to see some positive results soon enough.
