Business Marketing Show

In this episode we share the online marketing strategy we use with clients in the hotel, tourism and hospitality space.

This episode is designed to be a broad strokes guide for businesses of this type an is similar to what we’d present in one of our online marketing workshops.

A warning upfront: the strategy outlined here could easily be a 12 month project so important that you take this into consideration while you’re listening and not get overwhelmed.

The episode is split into two sections, quick wins, must haves and low hanging fruit and then the more broad higher level business strategy.

Quick Wins, Must haves and Low Hanging Fruit:

High quality photography

This goes without staying that you need the best possible quality photos on your site but so many businesses have horrible photos on their website.

You know yourself when you’re booking at hotel or looking a booking a trip or making some sort of reservation one of the first things you probably look at one a website are the photos.

Especially in the tourism and hospitality space, high quality, professionally taken photos are an extremely important part of your overall marketing strategy.

Our episode with Matt Reed is a fantastic one if you need to up-level your photography or are simply not sold on the power of photos, here’s the link:

https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-16-commercial-website-photography/

Click play on the video below and here from Matt directly about why photos are so important:

Video can also be an extreme powerful online marketing tool, a brief about us or “tour” style video can really up-level your sales and marketing game (if the video is done well!)

Here’s a great example from a DidgeridooBreath.com, a didgeridoo shop and popular tourist destination in Fremantle, Western Australia.

 

 

Online Booking Capability

People expect to be able to book flights, hotels, trips and make reservations online. They want to be able to make a true booking with a credit card and not just submit a request through a form.

In today’s world this is not optional, customers need to be able to buy, book or reserve AND pay directly on your website.

Little Hotellier and and Rezdy.com are two great apps to get this functionality up and running.

 

Reviews & Review Management/Monitoring

This is simple. You need online reviews. After looking at the photos the next thing website visitors do is check the reviews so it’s critical that you have a strategy in place to get reviews on an ongoing basis.

This can easily be automated with a tool like getfivestars.com

It’s also important you are monitoring reviews on an ongoing basis and respond to negative reviews in a timely manner

Airbnb & Tripadvisor profiles

Airbnb.com can be a goldmine for small hotels and accommodation providers and is definitely worth testing as a marketing channel.

A profile on Tripadvisor.com is pretty much mandatory these days as it’s generally the goto place for most people when they’re looking for reviews or travel suggestions.

Broad Strategy:

Mindset

Many business owners have the wrong mindset when it comes to online marketing strategies.

Fixing your mindset, particularly around time and cost investment, is a key part of making your online marketing strategy work effectively.

Unfortunately most small businesses owners choose services based on price instead of features, benefits and expected performance. Looking at the expected return on a service first, and then working backwards to determine what you can afford or an appropriate budget is a much better approach.

Other common mistakes in thinking and mindset:

• The blind quest wanting to be “number 1 in google” – for which term, which device, which location and which number 1 are you talking about? The Adwords results? The Google Maps results? Google Shopping or just the regular unpaid, organic search results (which are now often halfway down the page)?
• Thinking “Adwords is expensive”, it’s not if it works!
• Having a set and forget attitude – those days are over. You website and marketing strategy needs regular attention in order to deliver consistent and regular results.
• Looking at competitor websites and Google rankings continually/regularly/obsessively without working on your own site.
• Expecting overnight success and falling for sales gimmicks and tricks, e.g. “don’t pay until you rank”. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Those too good to be true offers do work in some cases but in other cases they can damage the underlying SEO fundamentals of your website so badly that you need to rebuild the site on a new domain.
• Only taking action when your business is in trouble…this is the worst time to be trying to get online marketing momentum!

Content

Having website content that matches the market expectations is critical, pages you’ll commonly need:

• a photo or gallery page
• testimonials and review page
• online booking page
• contact us page
• location page for every location with an embedded Google Map and link to Google Maps
• a detailed page for each product, service or experience you offer

High quality email and web hosting

There’s no excuse for email problems with today’s technology. Our email hosting providers of choice are Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is the better one if you’re used to using Microsoft Outlook. Google Apps is the business version of Gmail.

Many businesses try to get the cheapest web hosting possible which is a terrible idea. You know yourself, if a website is slow to load or unreliable you quickly lose patience and click away. Visitors to your website behave in exactly the same way. Slow and unreliable websites also hurt your Google ranking!

Brendan’s company has built a high performance, search engine friendly hosting product specifically for this reason: https://www.thesearchengineshop.com/website-hosting/

For more detailed information on hosting check out our hosting episode:
https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-14-web-email-business-hosting/

SEO & Adwords (aka a search engine strategy)

If you’re planning on getting traffic from the search engines then you’re going to need an SEO and Adwords strategy.

At a very minimum you should have an Adwords campaign running against your brand name as aggregator sites and booking agents like Agoda and Tripadvisor will absolutely be advertising and ranking their sites for your brand/business name.

Email marketing & social media

Email marketing is generally underdone in the hospitality space or done extremely poorly.

In episode 8 we talked in more detail about email marketing: https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-8-email-marketing/

 

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

 

In this episode we provide an ecommerce marketing blueprint and broadly outline the strategy we’re using right now with our ecommerce and online retail clients. This episode is designed to be a broad strokes high level strategy and is similar to what we’d present in one of our ecommerce marketing workshops.

Similar to the Small Business Online Marketing Blueprint in episode 49, we’ve presented the steps in the same order as we’d work through them with you if we were working one on one.

1. Understand your Business Fundamentals

Be clear, is your business a problem/solution type of business or do you need to actively generate awareness and demand for your products/services. In other words, is there active demand in the search engines for what you’re selling.

If there is activate demand then the strategy is likely more straightforward.
If not then you’ll need to test different marketing channels and be creative.

Frank Body is a great example of a business with a creative marketing strategy.

Are you shipping worldwide or just within your country? This will determine the channels you can use to market the business.

Do you need to educate the buyer before purchasing, what is the complexity of the sale? More complex sales are going to require more information on the website and a multi-step sales and marketing approach

Understanding your sales and marketing funnel is key to making your online marketing work effectively.

eCommerce businesses that are pure box shippers are going to be able to leverage a more simple marketing strategy. If your products are complex, are high priced or have a longer sales cycle then you’re marketing strategy is likely going to be more complex.

2. Use the right technology

Your choice of CMS (content management system) can determine whether the business will be successful or fail for two reasons:

1. The CMS doesn’t just drive the website, it becomes the underlying system that supports the entire business.
2. If the CMS can’t support key ecommerce marketing tools and tactics such as Google Shopping and Abandoned Cart Emails you’ll be at a serious disadvantage over your competition, this is a very common problem and can seriously impact your business.

Shopify is our preferred platform right now, it’s cloud hosted, cheap, has plenty of themes/templates and third party apps that can plug into it BUT that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for everyone. This is especially true if you’re doing something more complex than simply shipping boxes.

Other important pieces of technology:

• Email hosting – Google Apps or Office 365, email is mission critical and an ecommerce business has an even greater reliance on it.
• Ticket system for support – Zendesk.com.
• Email marketing – Mailchimp is a good starting point, Klaviyo.com is on the high end.

3. Traffic generation – getting visitors to your site

Search Engines – there are many elements to getting traffic from search and if your search strategy can be summed up as “I want to be number” then you have a problem. There are multiple search engines to take into account in the ecommerce world:

• Google – SEO, Adwords, Google Shopping or PLAs and in some cases Google Plus Local
• Amazon FBA & Amazon PPC
• Ebay – Ebay is still a goldmine for some products and markets

Email marketing – this is a special case because it’s so versatile and so powerful when actually done properly. Email can boost both traffic AND conversion rates.

Other channels:

• Facebook – ads, pages, groups, remarketing
• Google Adwords Display Network – banner ads, remarketing, dynamic remarketing
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Other social networks where your customers are spending time

4. Conversion rate opitmization basics

Use 2 payment methods, Stripe and Paypal are the low barrier entry points

Adding payment and shipping info on the product pages gives customers all the info they need in order to make a purchase without having to dig through your site to find it.

Make the cart as simple as possible, remove unnecessary steps and don’t ask for the info you don’t need.

Abandoned cart emails work like magic, here’s a basic template you can use: https://www.thesearchengineshop.com/abandoned-cart-email-template/

Live chat with proactive chat, this is an awesome way to uncover gaps in your site. Even if you just use it for 30 days it’s worthwhile. We talked about this in episode 25

Google Display Network remarketing and dynamic remarketing

A buyers guide with videos – especially where the product is complex, has lots of options or is something people don’t buy often, a buyers guide can help significantly boost your conversion rate AND it will help with traffic and SEO. Here’s a great buyers guide example the guys at Didgeridoo Breath have created: http://www.didgeridoobreath.com/didgeridoo-buyers-guide-s/271.htm and https://www.didgeridoodojo.com/didgeridoo-buyers-guide

Photography and video – we can’t overstate how powerful photography and video is in the ecommerce space. Our episodes with commercial photographer Matt Reed are a fantastic guide to leveraging photography in your marketing:

• https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/episode-16-commercial-website-photography/
• https://www.businessmarketingshow.com/website-online-video-fundamentals/

5. Trust, relationship and brand

This is a bit more of an intangible. Your brand is the perception of you and your business in the customer’s mind.

Customers will pay more for brand names so long term it’s important to cultivate and grow your brand.

Online, a large part of your brand is built through what you say, the tools you use and the way you market to customers. Some important brand building tools are email marketing, social networks and just generally caring about customers.

High quality design and imagery across all your marketing is also an essential part of brand building.

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.