As a hotel marketing professional and consultant for nearly a decade, I noticed that management teams of independent hotels are hesitant about investing in digital marketing.

As experiences shape opinions, it is understandable that poorly executed campaigns or the wrong investments in the past will discourage hoteliers from engaging in the same activity again.

Ultimately, my work is about guiding hotels to use digital tools to their advantage, both for brand building and revenue generation. It is common and normal that hotel marketers start with a flawed strategy, choose the wrong partners, use the wrong tools or miss some technical details.

To help minimize sunk cost and stop wasting money on ineffective marketing tools and activities, I will list the most common scenarios hotel waste their marketing dollars.

1. Paying ineffective PR agencies

This one is a classic. Your company pays a hefty monthly fee, arrange flights for journalists, and host events where journalists stay for free - just for a few good-looking articles and clipping reports that estimate the PR value of the activity to ridiculous amounts. In return, your hotel receives little to no bookings from the relevant markets.

To evaluate the effectiveness of your hotel PR activities? Conduct a brand awareness analysis by targeting a brand audit survey to the given markets. A fast and low-cost brand audit with Market Sampler can shed light on your brand awareness and popularity in any market.

2. Paying a commission-only advertising company

No risk, pay for confirmed bookings only, a massive increase in quality website traffic - these are just some of the claims hotel ad companies promise. Do you think they will risk spending their money on your ads? They know better than that.

The business model behind commission-only digital advertising is moderately technical, but I will explain it in plain English.

They will need access to your Google Analytics or Booking Engine to read out your audience and conversion data. Then will use your visitor data to set up cheap but aggressive retargeting banner campaigns for anyone who visited your website or booking engine. This setup guarantees that everyone who visits your booking engine will see their remarketing ads. When your customer returns to the website the second time to complete her booking, she likely saw the advert, and the company will take credit for that booking.

These companies stand between your hotel and your guests, attributing bookings to their campaigns. Very likely, you would have gotten those bookings without their ads.

In most cases, hotels won't see a revenue increase from commission-only digital ad campaigns. When dealing with such companies, always clarify their attribution models and accept view-through conversions.

3. Wasting money on poorly managed digital ad campaigns

Setting up Google Ads and Facebook Ads is easy. Having no prior experience or understanding of how it works, it is equally easy to get it wrong. There are a few common reasons why campaigns become unsuccessful.

  • Wrong targeting
  • No conversion tracking
  • Poor ads, and subpar landing page experience
  • Incorrect ad spending and campaign budgets
  • Lack of targeting exclusions

Good online campaigns start to deliver results relatively fast. In a week or two at the latest. If you don't see an increase in bookings or booking enquires shortly after a new ad campaign, then you want to check the following:

  • Is it reaching the right people?
  • Does it reach enough people?
  • Does the ad communicate clearly?
  • Is your website or landing page experience good enough?
  • What is your conversion rate between various steps of your funnel?

If you are concerned about your ad performance, we are happy to take a look - doing paid ads and measurements over ten years for dozens of hotels gave us substantial experience in this topic.

4. Paying a fortune for a new hotel website

The price you can expect to pay for a new hotel website might vary based on several factors, such as the design, functionality, and number of pages. Web design agencies will also give different quotes based on their reputation, availability, and their estimate regarding how much you can pay.

In the past few years, we managed nearly 20 website projects for 5-star hotels in various locations and segments. We have reviewed over 100 quotes.

For an independent 5-star hotel, a realistic price for a high-quality hotel website is below $6,000.

For a small hotel group or hotel collection, the price should not exceed $10,000, including any custom developments.

Basic, template-based hotel websites with minimal customization start around $1,000. In emerging markets, you will find the same starting from $500. Choosing a super-cheap designer is likely to make the process slow and problematic.

$500 is a realistic price for a simple one-page website, which is often more effective than an extensive one with content that hardly gets read.

Did you know that the best-converting hotel websites have all key information on the homepage, and are streamlined to divert people into the booking engine?

Here is a nice one-page hotel website template that costs only $19.

5. Hosting useless influencers

Collabs might be free, but you need to host them, feed them and spend time dealing with them. And most often, the results they provide are far from tangible.

Before inviting any of them, ask yourself the question: do you feel interested in booking any hotels they have been to while scrolling through their feeds? If not, then don't invite them. If an influencer got your attention, do a background check with Hype Auditor, or a similar tool to check if their audience does not include bots and fake accounts.

Instead of average influencers, invite people famous for something particular, other than social media. Actors, singers, and others who are likely to get third-party media coverage regarding their visit to your hotel. If your hotel is not attractive for high-profile influencers, try to work with micro-influencers willing to provide value like extra photography, videos, and other means.

Conclusion

I hope discussing these few common mistakes will help you to manage your hotel marketing better. Remember, if something is not showing results in a short time, then it won't work later. Don't fall for the vanity metrics fancy reports - test out things that make sense, and if it does not work, then analyze the experience to understand why it did not work. And if something works, understand why it works and initiate improvements based on those findings.

In many cases, changes you initiate as an improvement will ruin the existing setup that used to work.