Hotel Marketing

I spent part of yesterday in the company of people who work for a government department.

They spoke, almost entirely, using acronyms - you know, using abbreviations instead of proper words. Hotels do it too, using expressions such as EPoS or GDS

I still have no idea what they were talking about. Mind you, neither did they.

It set me thinking about acronyms for marketing in hotels. It doesn't seem to matter if you sex it up by abbreviating it - many hoteliers try to avoid doing marketing properly. These people seem to view a £ not spent on marketing as a £ saved, instead of a £ not invested.

Those same people then spend £1,000 on a painting for the lobby. Still, I suppose it's their train set, they can do what they like with it.

Anyway, let me introduce you to WSIBIFY.

Continue reading "Why Should I Buy It From You?"

Posted by HotelBlogger

Instead, people follow patterns of behaviour.

If your instructions fit with their normal pattern of behaviour, things will go fairly smoothly.

If your instructions are at odds with their normal pattern of behaviour you will struggle to get the result you want. Let me give you an example:

At the gym this morning, they were fixing some plumbing.

To let the plumber get into the ladies changing room to carry out the work, they swapped the changing rooms around. "Ladies" became "Mens" and vice versa.
So that we all knew about the change, the gym attendants had written the words, "Ladies" and "Men" on two bits of A4 paper and had stuck them to the changing room doors. Job done you would think. They certainly must have thought so...

...because they didn't mention it when I picked up my towel.

I nearly walked into the wrong changing rooms. Fortunately I noticed the sign, turned around and headed in the other direction.

To cut a long story short, at the end of my session I went for a shower, wrapped myself up in a towel and wandered, gently steaming, through the changing rooms towards my locker.

...to be greeted by three women!

Fortunately, they were better dressed then I was. Unfortunately, I seem to have grown beyond the size of towel that covers everything necessary all at the same time.
There was an awkward silence.

Eventually I broke it,

"Morning girls! Nice to see you!"
"Umm, is there not a sign on the door?"

The ladies were kind enough to stop staring (I'm not at my prettiest in the cold light of day) and trooped out towards the changing room entrance.

To my great relief, the sign declaring that this was now the "Mens" changing room was still there.

Red faces all round.

"We didn't see the sign, we just came in like we normally do!".

Still, we're all pals now.
My new friends were following their regular pattern of behaviour and demonstrated just how difficult it can be to make people change from that behaviour.

A sign isn't enough, you have to intervene, you have to declare what the new course of action is and show them what to do. People don't read signs, remember?

So it is with your website. People follow patterns of behaviour. Some of it they learned on other sites, Amazon or the BBC perhaps.
Most of it they developed themselves. Often, the behaviour pattern is influenced by words, but you've got to lead each and every visitor through the course of action you want them to take.
Get your website to match the general pattern of behaviour and you've struck gold.

If you manage this, you won't forget to tell me what it is, will you?

Posted by HotelBlogger

There's been a lot of debate in HotelSphere about this, with two schools of thought on the subject.

As you might expect, there are two approaches:

The first takes the view that your prospects "self qualify" on the basis of price. You state your price, they decide if it's within their budget. If it is, they carry on reading about your offer, if it's not, they move on to somebody else's offer. Leading with a price saves an awful lot of messing about.

The second takes the view that there's nothing unique about a price. Every product has one. Leading with a price means you're not telling your prospects about they key benefits of your product or service. Price led customers are not loyal customers - if they come to you because your price was lowest, they'll leave you for someone elses (price).

Continue reading "Is it a good idea to lead with a price?"

Posted by HotelBlogger

Remember that blog entry that popped up on page 2?

It's now on page 5!! In just a few hours, a small change to the blog itself appears to have moved the listing down by three pages!

So, remind me how these SEO companies can guarantee a Google page one listing?

Google is obviously a fluid, turbulent place to list your web pages.

These guaranteed seo guys must be really clever.........

Yeah, right.

Posted by HotelBlogger

Page 1, position 1 on Google! For the search term "hotel website copy". It took less than one hour.

The social networking site Ecademy.com was used.

Some social networking websites can be very useful for getting listed fast because they are spidered regularly by the search engines. Google in particular seems to like Ecademy.

Now we'll just have to keep en eye on the Hotelsphere.co.uk listings!

Posted by HotelBlogger

One of the features of specialising in copywriting and online selling for hotels, is that people who aren't clients (and in some cases have no intention of becoming one...) call up to "pick your brains" about the way their current supplier is performing.

Now, farbeit from me to cast doubt on the skills, services and products sold to hoteliers in the UK, but there does seem to be a bit of a gap between what is being provided and what could be provided. We'll leave aside any arguments about seo "snake oil" services for the moment. I hope you don't mind.

Today, we're going to consider a problem that was presented to me over the weekend. An hotelier emailed me yesterday asking for advice about getting his hotel listed on Google. The poor man felt that his seo "specialist" wasn't providing the service he could have been. The key phrases this chap wanted to use weren't difficult ones to work with. They weren't too short (anything short with "hotel" in it can be difficult, competition is strong for that keyword) and looked reasonable enough to me. Yet his advisor was telling him it would take three months to secure a page one listing.

Of course, most of you know that nobody can guarantee page one on Google. So I started thinking about how fast one can get a listing for a particular phrase. To find out, we need to run an experiment.

The HotelSphere website performs rather nicely for the search phrases "hotel website copywriter" and "hotel website copywriting". Both currently enjoy position 1, page 1 on Google.co.uk.

The challenge today, dear reader, is to secure a listing for the phrase "hotel website copy". For some reason, I've missed this out completely for HotelSphere. The best performance for the phrase is on my Ecademy listing, which appears on page 5 of Google. The HotelSphere website is effectively invisble for this phrase.

So today, I'm going to find out how long it takes for Google to find copy which has been designed with the phrase "hotel website copy" in mind.

There are a few things which need to be prepared, not least my lunch, so I'll be back soon.

Posted by HotelBlogger