11 actions hotels can take to survive the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and come out of it stronger
The Coronavirus pandemic has taken the world by surprise but there are still opportunities that can be made out of such a dramatic global crisis that can see your hotel coming out of it, stronger and better positioned for a quicker recovery.
Now is the perfect time to review your digital marketing campaigns to date, and assess how they have really performed over the years – how many rooms bookings, meetings and events enquiries, loyalty club subscriptions, spa bookings and telephone enquiries did these campaigns actually bring? Cross check your web marketing reports with the data stored inside your PMS and revenue management systems. Do they add up? Is the value added really there?
If there are questions or anomalies, now is the time to ask your web marketing agency to provide clear explanations as many may have extra time on their hands to provide this for you.
These are 11 things we are doing for our hotels to help them market better during and after this health crisis has passed, we hope that they can help your hotel too.
1) KEEP PPC CAMPAIGNS RUNNING
Even if the weekly STR and industry reports are showing devastating occupancy trends at this time, we have seen that flexible cancellation policies coupled with strong revenue management is helping long-term bookings. Even if you are seeing the PPC campaigns for the hotel brand drop, with careful management, there is the opportunity to spend less each month and to still win room bookings for later in the year. It’s also important to note that when PPC campaigns are switched off, it can take up to two-months before the old ad-campaign performance returns. That’s a two-month period where the OTAs will be collecting the hotel’s room revenue and charging 18-24% commission. Don’t switch off the hotel’s PPC, but instead put the campaigns into a low-advertising spend hibernation through this COVID-19 period, it will mean your hotel can recover more quickly coming out of it.
2) GET MORE ACTIONABLE DATA
Our Clients are receiving reports that are showing the countries where people are starting to use their booking engine (but not completing). It’s a simple and effective report that gives revenue managers insights on where current and future demand might be arriving from; it allows them to start thinking about packages and offers for those local markets, and it’s not a report that is readily available through most booking engines. If you knew that in the past 7 days there had been a 700% increase in booking engine sessions from a specific country, would that information not change the way you were marketing your hotel at the moment?
3) TRANSLATE YOUR WEBSITE
Hotels are a 24-hour business open to guests from all over the world. We know that inside every hotel there are multi-lingual staff and also, that it’s anybody’s guess when and where country level travel restrictions will be lifted. That makes it the perfect time to have your hotel marketing team prepare a translation file and have your local staff translate it. Not only will this improve your coverage in the local Google indexes, but also make it possible to use advertising networks where local language websites are a must. The biggest search engine in China, BAIDU, will not let a hotel advertise without having a website in the Chinese language. With an availability of multi-lingual staff in most hotels now is the perfect time to leverage these resources. We are sure that your local web-agency will also offer a very competitive price to implement those translations for you.
4) BUILD A LOYALTY CLUB
A loyalty club doesn’t need to be complicated, and can be managed entirely via a signup form and newsletters. A revenue manager creates a special rate code that can be accessed via a link that you include in the newsletter. If the OTA has the same rate available as your booking engine, but the loyalty club offers that same rate with breakfast included for free, people will book direct!
5) RUN SOCIAL MEDIA RETARGETING
At this moment, people the world-over are spending much more time on Social Media. When you target advertising to people that have already visited your website via social media, OTAs can’t compete alongside you in the same advertising space. We use these channels to highlight rate features and offers that website visitors might have missed when visiting the hotel online.
6) FOCUS SEO ACTIVITES ON LONG TERM TRAFFIC GROWTH
Whether your marketing functions are writing content for your hotel blog, or building web-pages that target specific keyword segments, now is the time to shift all these activities to the last quarter of 2020 and future business in 2021. Once travel restrictions are lifted OTAs will be fighting between themselves to own every piece of traffic they purchase. Let them do just that!
If prior to COVID-19 your hotel was running generic PPC campaigns, make sure to keep these campaigns under strict control and observation when they are restarted or you could find yourself heavily out of pocket. Instead now is the time to focus SEO activities on building organic traffic. In this way your hotel will be able to increase its long-term traffic goals, while reducing as much as possible the dependency on paid advertising channels at a time when cashflow is in very short supply.
7) IMPROVE YOUR TRACKING FOR CAMPAIGN REPORTING
While booking engines capture transactions, and Google Analytics will tell you the channel that delivered the booking, a lot of hotel tracking simply ends there. Tracking whether a visitor clicked a telephone number, completed a booking using a third-party widget or made an enquiry, is as important as a room revenues report. Ask your web marketing agency to bring all this business information together in a single report so it will become much easier to see it on one page and assess it. What could be worse than switching off a marketing campaign that might not have been delivering room revenue, but instead delivered event enquiries, just because the reporting functions had not been setup properly? Now is the time to make those changes.
8) MAKE YOUR WEBSITE LOAD FASTER
We set our benchmarks for website load times at three-seconds or less. Any slower will be costing your hotel business. Hotels have global appeal and the whole world does not have fast internet. Some hotels will rely on specific countries to provide their revenue, how long does it take for your website to load in those countries? Load-balancing, content delivery networks and other technological tweaks can improve load times in your key markets. Not only will this keep your existing customers happy, but it will mean that any new customers will have an even better experience with your hotel on their first visit. Search engines such as Google have also said that fast websites lead to better experiences and better coverage.
9) GET CLOSER TO YOUR AUDIENCES
Travel service providers all talk about the importance of personalization but the reality is either a long way off, or so complex to implement that it is simply out of reach for the vast majority of hotels. On the other hand, OTAs are able to invest the time and financial resources necessary to manage these types of campaigns. Largely due to the 18% commission rates they charge your hotel to bring you business. Every guest that stays at your hotel has an email address and all hotels are savvy at requesting this from their guests in some way – whether at check-in for a room, at the table for an events function or an F&B booking. When these emails make their way into your hotel newsletter database, what happens next
Simply sending newsletters to all your contacts results in low open rates and un-subscriptions. The newsletter service providers your hotel currently uses – we use Mailchimp, Dotmailer, Mailup, and Revinate - will almost certainly have a way to let you implement a process of guest profiling, that conforms with GDPR, and means that post COVID-19, your marketing teams can better target newsletter communications better to existing subscribers.
This will translate into more business, and a greater respect of your hotel by your customers who get relevant messages delivered to them from the get go.
10) KEEP IN REGULAR TOUCH, EVERYONE IS SUFFERING RIGHT NOW
All over the world nearly everyone is locked in at home. There will be families with small children with nothing to do, there will be Event planners and organizers wondering what impact COVID-19 is going to have on their future events, there will be couples fretting over when they can finally get married. Reach out and reassure them of the steps your hotel is taking to prepare them for re-opening. Ask your Head Chef to prepare recipes that mums and dads can make with their kids, ask your Events Team to write a summary of what the industry is reporting on the impact of COVID-19, so your Meetings Bookers can have something to share up their own management tree. Get your wedding planner to write about games guests can play on their wedding day, so couples planning a wedding can stay positive and focus on the big day itself. Reach out and reassure your audiences that life goes on and bring them closer to you in the process.
11) INVEST IN UNIQUE MARKETING SERVICES
OTAs remove the love and passion hotels have for the guest experience, transforming them into a filterable list of e-commerce products. There is no branding, little affection and hoteliers are constantly being asked to revise their pricing, extend their refund policies and to layer on exclusive discounts on what is already the lowest online rate.
An independent hotel cannot compete with an OTA in terms of its advertising budget and global reach, and we recognize first-hand how important OTAs are as a revenue partner for the hotels.
However, by investing in marketing activities tailored around your hotel, there is a huge amount of revenue simply sitting on the table that your hotel could be getting at a 5% channel cost instead of an 18% channel cost. Invested slowly, carefully and based on measurable results. By taking some or all of the steps in our first blog post, you can be sure that when your hotel is able to finally re-open its doors and welcome your guests from all over the world, it will be in a much better position than it was before this crisis started.
About the Author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides web marketing services tailored to the individual personalities of hotels; a complete range of digital services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
