NexGen Technology

Virtual fidelity

Marketing your hotel successfully on the Internet is easier than you think it is, says Milind Mody

Milind Mody Founder CEO eBrandz

'How do we market our property on the internet?' is one of the perennial questions which I face while interacting with hotel owners and managers. Their questions cover many aspects including the design, look and feel of websites, hotel reservation engines and most importantly getting traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Being primarily businessmen, hoteliers are less interested in the technical aspects of what needs to be done to improve conditions and are more interested in fixing the site. There are some exceptionally designed websites, but they are a handful. Most of the hotel websites have very poor design; they are probably created by the owner's relative. I even saw a website whose grainy hotel images were clicked by a low resolution camera of a mobile phone! Who is going to come and see my simple five-page website when websites like Travelocity are spending millions of dollars on internet marketing? Maybe I am better off listed on Travelocity or other affiliate websites. This is how most hotel owners think. They do not realise that Travelocity is spending millions of dollars on millions of things. They are spending money on hotel reservation, airline reservation, limousine service, cruise and a host of other activities. Remember, money spent on discounting your room inventory to display on Travelocity is money given away. Spend it on promoting your own hotel website and you have a brand value that endures and continually adds value to your business in the long-term. The next step. Try and create as much visibility for your hotel website at various touch points in your interactions with guests. The opportunities are endless - visiting cards, brochures, room display articles and stationery, gifts, complimentary giveaways, etc.

First impressions

Before we explore internet marketing, it is of vital importance that other basic requirements are in place. It is of no use to do internet marketing only to find that visitors either don't like your website or cannot do instant online reservations. Remember the first impression is very important, crucially so to an internet audience which does not have time.

The website's look and feel should be decent. That is the first thing guests are going to see. It needs to represent the brand truthfully. Although images are important, do give equal importance to its textual content. If a visitor comes to your site and likes your property, is the website geared with the tools to handle online? Most hoteliers have a contact form which accepts client information and tells guests they will get back to them later. In this day and age, this is a huge mistake because if you are not offering instant online reservation, your competitor already is. Hence it's essential to have some sort of online reservation engine integrated on your website so that your visitors can instantly book a room of their choice.

Free and paid listings

Two of the most popular ways of bringing traffic from search engines are through free and paid listings. The latter is on the right hand side of free listings and are marked as 'sponsored links'. There are also one or two paid listings (in different colour) above the free listings. The free listings are called as natural rankings and the paid ones are called PPC. It takes six to eight months for the website to start appearing in top 20 or 30 free listings. The process is complicated as lot of thought process has to go in selecting the keywords. Then there is the initial analysis of your website, analysing its strengths and weaknesses with that of your competitors and then implementing a strategy that changes website coding and getting other websites to link to your website. Research shows that it has a much better RoI than any other form of marketing (which includes print, banner, television or other media). The flipside is that it takes time to see results (minimum six to eight months). However, in the real world this amount of time is natural for any marketing to take effect.

Paid listings which appear on the right hand side of search results are called adwords by Google. You can start getting targeted traffic through this within few days of signing up. In a paid listing programme, you select keywords and phrases important to your business (eg hotels in Mumbai, five-star hotels in Delhi, etc) and bid to be placed highest in search results. You can also select the countries in which you want to target your ads. It's better to let professionals handle this type of marketing because many times in trying to save money hoteliers decide to do this work in-house only to realise later that they have burnt hundreds of dollars in waste traffic. I recommend hoteliers to do a mixture of both types of marketing - free as well as paid listings.

One problem with Indian web hosting companies is that many times they do not save log files (to save some space on their web server). It's very important that you ask your web host to provide access to your log files. If they still don't allow you access, then switch your web hosting company.

These exercises should help you increase your online sales. It does not matter whether you are a large or small hotel, independent or franchise hotel, internet marketing works for any property with an average room rate varying from US $40 to US $400+. It also allows you direct access to your customers.

What's the next logical step? Contact a professional search engine marketing company which will review your website and come up with a marketing strategy for it. Most of these search marketing companies charge quite less than a traditional advertising agency. However, do your due diligence in selecting a company which has a proven track record, can give you client references and is not promising you the moon! There are many individuals and companies out there who can try and sell you snake oil. Beware of them.

(The writer is founder CEO of eBrandz that specialises in building brands on the web through SEO and PPC marketing. It is the only Indian company to be among the top five SEO companies in the world)