6 serious mistakes that hotels should avoid in online marketing

A marketing funnel is basically always structured as a funnel. The aim is to generate bookings.
It's about first attracting attention, then arousing interest, creating a desire for the product and finally getting people to take action.
You've probably heard this many times before.

"What do I do with the potential guests who fell out of the funnel at some point?" This refers to shopping cart abandoners or users who clicked on your ad, browsed your site but did not book.

Because what is ignored in the funnel concepts is remarketing. This means targeting people who have already come into contact with your hotel. They are more likely to make a booking as they have already shown interest. Re-targeting them holds a lot of booking potential.

No matter how nice the texts on your hotel website read or how exciting your new arrangement is - if people are not interested in it, i.e. do not actively search for it, you will only be visible in the search engines to a limited extent. A well-developed keyword strategy is therefore essential. Because only if you know what potential guests are looking for can you put together packages tailored to them, build landing pages and optimize your hotel website.

Keyword strategies include researching the current keywords with which you rank on Google & Co. In addition, other keywords that guests use to search the web for offers like yours. This allows you to create a keyword set for your website, which you can use to optimize the headlines and descriptions of your page that appear on search engines, adapt the content of your pages and discover potential for new landing pages.

Admittedly, working out the strategy is quite tedious and takes a lot of time - but it's worth it if you rank at the top of Google for the relevant keywords!

If you don't have time to do this task yourself: For experienced agencies like XPORT, it's part of their daily business as part of search engine optimization.

Why make it complicated when it can be simple? Artificial intelligence can do a lot of work for us. Social media posts, ad texts and website content can be easily created with ChatGPT, for example. But if the data used to feed the AI is not up to date, factual errors can creep in. Perhaps the writing style doesn't appeal to your target group at all. Blindly adopting these texts is not a good idea. A thorough check and revision of the material created is a must.

Human automatisms should also be treated with caution. Just because something worked well once doesn't mean it will continue to do so forever. For example, your advertisement that has been running for two years without change, the hotel website from the 2000s. Which brings us to the next mistake.

What I don't know doesn't make me hot. But not satisfied either. If the tracking on the website is missing or not working properly, you don't know whether your hotel online marketing measures are achieving the desired results. Whether search ads on Google and Bing or creative posts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are being clicked to visit your hotel website. How many users who come to the site from these ads also book? How much revenue do they generate? How long do they stay on the landing page, do they use the contact form or do they prefer the call icon? These figures show whether website visitors are finding what they expected. If necessary, the ads and / or the landing page need to be optimized.

If you need support with tracking, we are happy to help.