How can hoteliers structure their online marketing strategy?

How does a hotelier structurally shape his own digital marketing strategy? And: how can he optimise it? We asked Thomas Dieben, owner of Becurious, specialised in digital marketing strategy for the hotel sector: "Know the route to reach and entice your (future) guest!"

"Always start with the story of the hotel itself. Among other things, you then talk about your existing 'branding' and identity. And, what is your current reputation? That immediately yields interesting conversations. Because, to be honest, I come across many hoteliers who cannot even formulate their own story very well," says Dieben.

Hotel branding - Hotel website design and development - Online marketing

"Then you make a sharp analysis and evaluation of the so-called 'tech & marketing stack'. For instance, we look at which systems and programmes the hotelier uses for its marketing. What does the technology of the current website look like? Are there any opportunities for improvement in that area? Once all that is properly mapped out, you get to the target groups you want to serve. There are many ways to do this. For instance, you can reason this out from a demographic or geographical perspective. Of course, you can also try to get guests to come to your hotel who share certain common interests."

Dieben explains that, finally, setting strategic objectives is essential. "Just make it as concrete as possible," he says. "What percentage of direct bookings do you want to have? Or, by what percentage do you want to increase on that? And, very concretely, how do you increase visibility? In what ways do you want to interact with your guests?"

Needless to say, all the choices the hotelier makes involve investment. "This is precisely why it is good to budget clearly. Know where you stand. In addition, it is essential to assess whether your current team is capable of shaping that digital marketing. Are those qualities and competences present in the organisation?"

Gradually, you then come to the resources that facilitate the hotel's operational execution. "At this point, we always check whether a hotel has its own website in good technical shape. Is it easy to manage via its own CMS geared towards the hotel industry? For example, how is the organic findability and multilingualism of the website? And... is the loading speed good enough? Moreover, we are curious about the security level. Naturally, topics such as SEA, SEO, e-mail marketing and conversion optimisation come up at that stage. These are all tools that a hotelier 'must' deploy in order to achieve the strategic objectives set."  

He says that at this point, the writing of the strategic plan will start. "In this document, we define what the goals are and how you want to achieve them as a hotel. If you link this plan to budgets then you are usually thinking a year ahead." 

"Well... and then we will really start!" says Thomas Dieben, laughing. "Once the plans are approved and the hotel gives us a 'Go', we can get to work. With us, the basis always lies in a good and appealing website that we develop using our specialised Hotel CMS as the technical basis. So that's where we start. Once this foundation is in place, then the various online marketing tools are set up and implemented - according to plan. So together with the hotel, we literally build its online profile. We see that this way of working always results in an increase in the number of direct reservations. This easily recoups the investments in the website and online marketing deployment in proportion to the commission savings."

Measuring is knowing, which is the beauty of our profession, Dieben concludes. "After all, it creates a lot of relevant data that we use for analysis and optimisation. We give our clients a lot of insights. For instance, we send monthly performance reports and show clear statistics on our CMS dashboard. This allows us to see whether we have achieved the strategic objectives and where adjustments are needed. Together with our clients, we thus plot the successful route to the right guests with the end result being an increase in turnover!"

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