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Benefits of Running Paid Advertising for your Hotel
Hello my hospitality friends,
Welcome to our next blog installment, today we are continuing our digital marketing journey with an overview of some of the key benefits of running a paid ad campaign to drive traffic to your website.
Costs/Budget
As a small to mid-sized hotel, your spending on marketing campaigns needs to be tightly managed and digital ad campaigns can be much cheaper than traditional offline channels (print/radio) which will also provide a good return on investment. Well-designed paid advertising allows you to set and control exactly how much you want to spend (most popular formats are charged on a pay-per-click basis – so you only get charged if customers click!). In addition, as your paid ad will be designed to land your customers onto your direct booking channel/website, you will avoid the fees/charges of third-party websites (e.g. booking.com or Expedia).
Speed
When you pay for an advert it is live straight away vs. search engine optimisation which can take weeks/ months to build momentum and push you to the top of organic search results. This is particularly important if you are running a targeted promotion around key dates or special offers (e.g. St Patrick's day weekend specials etc). This allows you to tap into the important ‘last minute’ booking activity where customers will often make decisions quickly and don’t want to spend a lot of time reviewing lots of options and focus on top results.
Data
Using paid ads on social media (e.g. Facebook/ Instagram) facilitates small hotels to utilise their vast user data to filter and target your ads to specific groups of users channels. Using tools like Google AdWords can give great visibility of exact keywords that customers search for to find your property. It also gives key performance indicators like click-through rate (CTR), ad impressions and conversion rate. This data can help identify which keywords generate the higher amount of sales or conversions which can help refine future campaigns.
Brand Awareness
Utilizing paid ads on a variety of digital media channels will increase the online presence of your hotel where your customers are spending their time - creating recognition and engagement opportunities.
In summary paid advertising can be very beneficial and ideally should be undertaken alongside and integrated with your organic marketing strategy. At premium digital, we would be delighted to talk more about what your advertising goals are and assist you to select the best platforms and ad types to reach your key customer groups- get in touch with a member of team.
For more information on the benefits of running paid adverts in the Hospitality Industry read more Premium Digital blogs.
Premium Digital Working for Success in Hospitality.
Written by Mark Conmee
References:Avvio.
2022.PPC Advertising for your hotel Available
at: https://www.avvio.com/digital-marketing/pay-per-click/
Hey Mark, great read!! I agree with you that paid advertising is very beneficial to the hospitality industry. Once the parameters are right your hotel's advert or blog can reach its target audience faster than traditional marketing efforts. In terms of the cost of PPC campaigns, I think it is important to note the return on ad spend or ROAS. Most hotels would base their campaigns off a ROAS set in advance of the campaign which also helps determine if the campaign is not performing or has overperformed. Great read though, looking forward to the next blog in the series.
ReplyDeleteSuper blog Mark, I particularly agree that it is important to use a variety of advertising platforms on digital media channels to increase the online presence of your hotel.
ReplyDeleteHi Mark, thanks for this blog all very good points to discuss. I like the way you highlight the impact of online paid advertising and the speed a customer can view and track results as it does not take too long to set up Google Ads, but it is important to have a clear marketing plan. - F, Pinate
ReplyDeletegreat post
ReplyDeletegreat tips and some excellent takeaways and food for thought.
Caitriona
Hi Mark, you have highlighted some very valid points for paid advertising for hotels. This is very much a crucial part of a hotel's online strategy nowadays due to increased competition online. It is important to note that with paid advertising (PPC) on Google, it is recommended that a hotel would run both brand and non-brand campaigns. Brand PPC would tend to have a higher ROI than non-brand however with non-brand you are putting your hotel out there to people who do not know your brand and are searching using generic terms e.g. 5 star hotels dublin. Your hotel wants to feature as much on the top search engines pages as possible. Google Analytics is a great tool to use to analyse your PPC campaigns and monitor your ROI and this should be done on a regular basis.
ReplyDelete