How can a Hospitality Business Improve their Digital Presence?

How can a hospitality business improve their digital presence?

The hotel industry is a highly competitive industry and hoteliers are increasingly seeking ways to capture a larger share of travel shoppers.  A well-executed digital marketing strategy can expand your brand online, while keeping pace with new technologies and travelers demanding expectations.   
Make a good first impression
Your hotel website is your most valuable long-term asset, providing the most important opportunity to engage travelers and make them your guest.  The majority of travelers search for travel needs online, hence spend more time on websites that provide a visual experience using photos, tours, and videos.  When designing your website provide key information but keep it limited to short concise blocks of text.  Instead, focus on showing the guest the level of quality they will experience when arrive at your hotel. 
Take your hotel mobile
As you map out your digital marketing strategy consider that 63% of all cell phone users go online.  There fore, your website should be dynamic and responsive for an optimal mobile experience. With more consumers using mobile apps to look up travel deals, hotel locations, hotel amenities, the experience needs to be seamless.  Be realist in your expectations for the mobile aspect of your digital marketing strategy, as it provides the highest ROI when it is used as in concert with your website functionality and social media efforts.  
 
Connect with travelers on social networks
As technology continues to introduce new apps, travelers are using one or more social networking platform to during their search, shop and buy process. Therefore, it’s important that you pay close attention to trip advisor ratings and reviews, maintain an active presence on Facebook and Twitter. Similarly, get involved in review sites like Trip Advisor and Raveable, to stay abreast of what your previous, current and prospective guests are saying about your hotel. Photo sharing sites like Pinterest and Instagram  have resurrected the glossy travel brochure, providing you with yet another opportunity to charm your guest. Lastly, don’t forget email marketing: it is still the most widely tool used to share information and trip ideas. 
Cross promote 
Promote your hotel across multiple channels to ensure you get the most maximum exposure in front of travel shoppers. Large and small boutique hotels can benefit by signing up with one of the vanity sites lie, booking.com, tablethotels.com or SHEKNOWS.com, because this will consolidate your efforts, while creating opportunities for collaboration with businesses in the local area. 
  
 
Hotel Palomar on Pinterest

Final Thoughts
A successful digital marketing strategy must communicate your hotels brand, features, and amenities and overall experience to hotel guests using a combination of tools or an all-in-one hotel digital marketing management platform.  More importantly, regardless of which tools you choose, they must be flexible and prepare your hotel for the constantly change demand of digital marketing. 

ChangeU: for your independent study ...

Tnooz  http://www.tnooz.com/  a global provider of news, analysis, commentary, education, data and business services to the travel, tourism and hospitality industry.
Global Hospitality Insights: top thoughts for 2014.  http://goo.gl/0iQESq This report reveals key issues and trends we believe will be the primary areas of focus in the global hospitality industry in the upcoming year.

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References

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2015 TechTarget Media Consumption Report: Guided by content – How IT buying teams navigate through the research and purchasing process