For an independent hotel, it is sometimes hard to get noticed. When a potential guest is searching for a hotel in their chosen destination, they tend to shop around. They could find your hotel on booking.com or in most cases via a search on google.com, visit your brand site to see the pictures of your rooms and the services you offer. Then click off to review more options within the area. According to Google, If your hotel is the first one they visit, 96% of the time they will not make a reservation. It is also likely they have forgotten about you by the time they have come to make a decision on where they are going to stay. Remarketing allows your hotel to reconnect with guests who have visited your site, to remind them to come back and visit your website again, normally incentivizing them to do so by offering a unique discount. By providing re-engagement with visitors is a much more cost-effective way of converting them into future guests at your hotel. There are three main ways to re-connect with your guest which every hotel no matter whether they are big or small should consider.

Remarketing using Google Adwords

Use Google Analytics to review which potential guests are visiting your hotel website. You can filter the users by which pages they have visited or whether they entered into the reservation process then clicked off, demonstrating that were interested in staying at your hotel and for whatever reason decided to continue with their search

Within Google AdWords, you can create specific ads to be shown on the Google Display Network, and only to those previous visitors. We recommended that within your ads, you can get incentives them to click back to the website by offering a discount or special offer like a free spa treatment or upgrade for example. You can increase your conversions further by creating a unique landing page with your booking engine embedded with the exclusive offer.

RLSA (Remarketing List for Search Ads)

While the remarketing through Google AdWords is based on display ads, there is also another way of remarketing via traditional text ads. Again, the same principle applies, i.e., a person who has visited your website, only this time, when they go back to Google to continue their search for "hotel in London," they will see your text ad within the search results with the option to revisit your site and finally book. Google is still the number one method for travelers seeking hotels in specific destinations so is an essential tactic in re-engaging with your potential guests.

Facebook Dynamic ads

Along similar lines to Remarketing via Google, but this time re-connecting with users who are also Facebook users who will see your ads appear in their timeline feed. As over 1.4 billion people are connected to Facebook and growing all the time, this provides an excellent way for hotels to reconnect with potential guests who have recently visited your website and convert them into prospective guests by sending them back to a landing page with a unique offer or promotion.

For the majority of independent hotels over the last few years, increasing their dependency on OTA´s for your online bookings has been the norm. However, as we see with chains like Marriott and Hilton, the fightback has begun. By introducing a simple marketing strategy into your hotel's marketing plan for 2017 will provide you with a clear, simple and cost effective way of re-connecting with potential customers and converting them into guests.

If you would like Hotelient to help your hotel in creating a remarketing strategy, then email [email protected] for more information.

John kearney
Hotel Sales & Consultancy Specialist - Director of Hotelient
Hotelient

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