Four Keys To Effective Hotel Marketing

Running a guest house, bed and breakfast or small hotel isn't easy. With so many tasks competing for your immediate attention it is little wonder that some jobs get put off until later. Unfortunately, the task that gets dropped most often is the hotels marketing and promotion, which is possibly the most important job in the whole business.

So in order to give your hotel marketing the attention it deserves in order to deliver the results your hotel needs, your hotel marketing plan should include four key elements:

A stream of eager traffic

In order to stay profitable, hotels need a constant supply of fresh customers to fill their rooms. It is essential therefore that you put your marketing message in front of as many interested prospects as possible.

To do this you need to place your message where your customers gather. For example, if you are selling golf breaks, it would be a waste of your time and effort to advertise in a sports car magazine. It makes more sense to target golf magazines or websites, or possibly business publications aimed at your particular demographic.

An Irresistible Offer

Once you have found what marketing legend, Gary Halbert called 'a hungry crowd' it is important to present to them an irresistible offer. The key here is in the word irresistible. Having worked so hard to attract your viewers' attention it would be foolish to make a weak, feeble or bland offer.

Simply offering the same breaks at the same rate as all your competitors will do nothing to make you stand out from the crowd. Be unique, create packages that nobody else offers and you will go a long way to eliminating your competition.

Hotel Marketing Automation

The biggest improvement you could make to your hotel marketing is by introducing automation into the mix. Why? Because once you automate your efforts they become a system that is both repeatable and predictable.

Simply do the work once and let your system do the monotonous tasks without anything more than a watchful eye from you. This frees up your time so that you can tackle the more demanding issues of the day.

Rinse And Repeat

Set up the perfect marketing system that ticks away on autopilot? Well, why not develop another package that targets another demographic and set up another marketing stream to target them? Remember, the hardest part of any task is taking that very first step.

By creating a number of diverse marketing streams you are effectively spreading your marketing net wider. This means that you are targeting your customers with pinpoint accuracy rather than the wasteful blanket approach used by most hoteliers. As a result you no longer focus on price-cutting or deep discounts in order to put heads on beds.