As a hotelier, you do not need to go undercover at your competitors' properties to discover their online marketing secrets. With the online investigation skills I'm about to share with you, you will be able to uncover your competitor's online marketing and selling strategies without resorting to cloak and dagger tactics. It's not only incredibly important to continually monitor your hotel's online performance and marketing strategies, but it's just as crucial that you keep a watchful eye on your competitors. Learn to keenly observe the competition so that your hotel is ahead of the game and constantly seeking out additional opportunities to maintain a competitive edge over other hotels in your market.
9 Professional Investigation Skills to Master
Let's start easy. Instead of manually searching for all the information about your competitors, have that information automatically sent to you directly. Watching your competitors is as easy as checking your inbox.
#1 Set up Google Alerts.
When hotels in your comp set are being talked about online, you'll know it! Create a Google Alert for each of the top competitor hotels in your market. Choose your settings for how often you want to receive notifications of activity, and the news will come straight to your email. These alerts can help you monitor your hotel's online reputation, as well as keep you up to date with the competition's new landing pages, special offers and other updates.
#2 Sign up for eNewsletters from your competitors.
Want to know what exclusive specials and deals the competitors are offering? Do they have a special event coming up? Hear it straight from the source. A more advanced private eye would be mindful of the email address they submit. An @Hilton or @Marriott email submitted to a Holiday Inn may raise a flag and they could purposely remove you from the email list. Perhaps use a less suspicious address such as your personal Gmail account. Digest the eNewsletters and determine if the special event, deal, or news is a similar tactic your hotel needs to capture bookings and remain competitive in the market.
Now that we are intercepting the competition's messages, let's cross the border and visit their web pages to investigate further.
#3 Regularly review hotels' brand or independent websites.
Plan these frequent online visits to take note of a couple key items. First, review the hotel's keyword strategy. From the pages meta content and the copy on the page, you can determine the different keywords for which the hotel is striving to rank in the search engines. Do they have a well developed strategy? Perform a manual search on Google. Are they ranking on the first page of Google's search results for these keywords? Are these keywords your hotel wants to target as well? Second, look for creative special offers as well while you peruse their website. Is there a special offer your hotel is missing and should have available as well? Can you offer more intriguing and valuable offers to the guests? It is likely that shopping the competition will spark your own creativity to generate new enticing hotel packages.
#4 Run a mobile search for the competition.
Take out your nifty high-tech smart phone device and run a search for your competitors. Find out who has a mobile-friendly website and is capturing mobile searchers. If all your competitors have a mobile friendly website, then your hotel is missing the opportunity of competing and attracting these searchers who are booking with the competition from their mobile phones. Or rather, if none of the competitors have a mobile strategy in place, your hotel could be at a great advantage with a mobile-friendly website. Your hotel would be in a position to convert the majority of mobile searchers to book at your hotel with the user-friendly mobile website. Furthermore, investigate the current traffic to your website. Are a good portion of the visits arriving at the site on a mobile device? If this is true, the hotel is already in need of optimizing their mobile strategy so that users can easily find information about the hotel and make reservations. Ask yourself, if your hotel does not already have an optimized mobile website, is it time to get one now?
#5 Get social with your comp set.
"Like" other hotels in your market on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. This will help you stay current with their daily messaging, offers, events and promotions available on these channels. Gain key insights into what the competition is doing well on social media and what their weaknesses are. If the market is super active on social media with special promotions, contests and highly engaging visual content, be sure to match and go beyond this level of activity and special offers to garner interest in your hotel on social channels. Likewise, in a market with weak social media influence, take the opportunity to really stand apart for the competitors with a strong social media strategy to be highly engaged with fans and effectively establish your hotel as the authoritative voice of the area.
There's more… read the remaining four investigation skills on the Blue Magnet Interactive Blog
