Hotel Marketing Podcast Episode 198: 8 Marketing Strategies For Hotels With High Occupancy

Is your hotel experiencing high occupancy? Congratulations! Pat yourself on the back, pour yourself a drink and get back to work. Today we are going to dive into how hoteliers can make the most of great occupancy numbers to push their marketing efforts to the next level.

Enjoy the full article at https://www.travelboommarketing.com/blog/marketing-strategies-for-hotels-with-high-occupancy/ and keep listening to find out how to lock in fantastic growth for years to come when you apply these 8 strategies.

1. Build relationships with your current guests

• Your most important guest is your current guest.
• That’s because when you create a positive, unforgettable experience for your current guests, chances are they’ll turn into repeat guests.
• Whether it’s surprising your younger guests with treats, offering complimentary drinks at check-in, or just listening and responding to questions and needs, making a strong first impression can lead to a consumer-to-business relationship that lasts for years to come.

2. Push for revenue through add-ons and on-site purchases

• This could be through add-ons like a bottle of wine or basket of snacks in the room after check-in, food or arcade credits, or discounted tickets to nearby attractions available only through your hotel.
• You could push for additional food and beverage revenue by offering a coupon to your on-site dining outlets. Or offer discounted rates for your hotel’s paid services, whether that’s yoga classes, beach chair rentals, or hiking tours.
• If you’re having trouble filling your most expensive rooms, consider upselling to the right guest and throw in an extra perk to make the upsell even more appealing.

3. Pivot your paid search bidding strategy

• If you’re noticing that your more expensive rooms are still sitting empty, it may be time to pivot to a Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy.
• Switching your Google Ads hotel paid search campaigns to a Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy will aim to drive as much revenue as possible within your budget by potentially serving your ads to higher-yielding customers.

4. Look ahead to periods of low occupancy

• When current occupancy is high, it’s time to start looking toward periods of low occupancy and adjusting your marketing efforts to fill those dates
• Influence prospective guests to book during these periods through ad copy messaging, website messaging, imagery, blog articles, and hotel deals themed to specific dates, seasons, or holidays.
  • Think back to school deals, fall foliage packages, staycations
  • Identify events happening in your area during low occupancy periods and market toward people attending the event. 

5. Build demand for down the road

• In Episode 191 we covered How to Analyze Demand Generation Campaigns and covered a few demand generation tactics. 
• When your occupancy is high, it’s the perfect time to develop these strategies and start generating demand in your property for future dates

6. Reach travelers that stayed in your area but didn’t stay at your hotel

• Thanks to Facebook Ads, we can combine the unfamiliarity of an awareness campaign with the familiarity of a remarketing campaign.
• In this case, people may be unfamiliar with your hotel but they are familiar with your hotel’s location.
• In your ad set settings, 
  • Set your location targeting to your area 
  • Adjust your geo-targeting settings to “People just recently in your location” 
  • Exclude your page fans and your past guests. 
• Now you can introduce your property to fresh faces that are already familiar with your area.

7. Minimize availability for high-commission channels

• If you know your property is full for certain date ranges, don’t provide rates to OTAs for those time frames
• Work on filling the remaining rooms through channels with less expensive CPAs

8. Market to your most profitable guests

• Using past customer data, you should be able to identify the group(s) of people that typically spend more at your property. 
• Use this knowledge to build out campaigns across multiple channels that target these demographics.

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60 Seconds To Success

How to identify non-brand keywords that you’re site is ranking for – Go to Search Console > Performance > Queries > Hit the Filter on the far right under dates > Top Queries > Change “Contains” to “Does Not Contain” > Type your brand name or part of your brand name > click Done. You now have a list of non-brand keywords that are driving traffic to your site. 

From here you’ll want to look for queries that have an Avg rank of 6+ and see if you can improve those and drive even more traffic. 

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Newsaroos:

• Day Passes Helping Hotels Plug Pandemic Holes: https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/Day-passes-helping-hotels-plug-pandemic-holes-in-revenue 
• CoStar puts out articles two days apart with somewhat conflicting headlines
  • Aug 17 – Latest Hotel Forecast: Leisure Surpasses 2019; Business and Group Have ‘a Long Way To Go’
  • Aug 18 – Forward Bookings Tell Story of Corporate, Group Recovery
  • Though the headlines are somewhat conflicting, the data within each article is showing what we all know. Corporate/Business/Group travel is down, but it is slowly coming back.

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Submit your questions and topic ideas on Twitter to @_travelboom or info@travelboommarketing.com.

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