The travel industry is changing. Not only are more people choosing to stay at home during their vacations but also trips to popular destinations are becoming more affordable as a result of COVID-19. So it’s time to reevaluate how you’re marketing your hotel brand online and what methods are most effective.
You’ve probably heard about the ‘trendy-traveller’ stereotype. The trendy traveller is often described as someone who wears sunglasses even when he is indoors, is constantly checking their phone and is extremely aware of what’s going on around them. If you’re familiar with the profile, you’ll understand why booking.com is among the world’s most popular travel websites. The luxury hotel chain uses a mix of traditional and digital marketing to attract well-heeled business travellers to their websites. But how exactly do they do it? We take a look at their strategy and how you can apply this to your own marketing.
Search Marketing: Background And Evolution
Let’s start with some general search marketing knowledge. From a very basic standpoint, search marketing is any type of marketing activity that involves the content and keywords of the website or app you’re trying to get traffic from. The majority of marketing activities can be considered search marketing, including paid ads, SEO, and content building.
The advantage of search marketing is that you’re not necessarily targeting one particular audience. Instead, you’re usually aiming at a general audience, which can be both your regular visitors and the people discovering your site or app for the first time.
In 2018, Google updated their search engine algorithm, which made understanding search marketing slightly more complicated. Back in 2016, Google took a fairly straightforward approach to SEO, rewarding websites that were well-structured and concise. In 2018, however, Google’s search algorithm seems to have changed, becoming more complex and placing more emphasis on UX.
While this might seem like a bad thing, it actually opened up up some great opportunities for marketers. The key is to make sure you have a good handle on what’s changed, as well as what hasn’t. Here are some of the changes and how they can affect your bookings.com search marketing.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising, or ‘paid search’, is very similar to organic search. The only difference is that you’re paying to have your ads shown on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Most big brands, such as Google and Facebook, offer pay-per-click (PPC) ads that can be customized to suit your needs. When a potential customer performs a search on your brand or a keyword you’ve chosen, your ad will appear alongside the search results.
Paid search is one of the most effective marketing methods. It’s easy to set up, and you can target the right audience. The only downside is that you’ll need to pay for each click.
Organic SEO
‘Organic search’ refers to the results on the first page of a search engine, such as Google or Bing. Essentially, organic search is getting those results naturally, as opposed to having paid for them. Think of PPC as the crack cocaine of online marketing, offering amazing results in the short-term but with many downsides.
Keyword optimization and structured navigation are 2 of the most important factors in organic SEO. These 2 factors influence whether or not your website or app will appear in the organic search results for relevant keywords.
The better you do on these 2 factors, the better will be your organic SEO. In other words, the more you optimize for, the better you’ll perform in organic search. Keep in mind that you can’t just optimize for one keyword. You have to optimize for a handful of keywords that are closely related to one another.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is, simply put, marketing through content. Think of content as digital ink on paper. The better the content, the better the results. You’re not necessarily creating content to attract visitors, but rather, you’re using the content to communicate something about your product or service.
The best content marketers know how to craft engaging stories that establish credibility. They also create in-demand content that will gradually evolve into a steady stream of traffic and qualified leads.
You can use content to position yourself as an expert in your industry, to provide interesting insights into trending topics, or to raise brand awareness among a target audience. When done right, content marketing can be a highly effective tool.
User Experience (UX)
The user experience, or UX as it’s commonly known, influences the way your audience feels when using your site or app. Essentially, the UX is the combination of everything your website or app does to ensure the user enjoys their overall experience. A good UX makes users feel empowered, while a bad UX can make them feel anxious and overwhelmed.
Good UX is an integral part of effective search marketing, and it’s something you have full control over. When designing your site or app, you need to keep the user’s needs in mind. Think of your digital ink on paper, as before. The UX is what your digital ink is doing for the reader, whether it is interesting them, informing them or entertaining them. You can use Google’s UX researcher tool to analyze the user experience of your competitors.
You need to make sure the UX is easy to navigate, quick to find the information you’re looking for and fun to use. When testing the UX of your website or app, use a mobile phone and keep an open mind. Don’t just focus on whether or not you were able to find what you were looking for. Instead, try to understand what made it easy for you to find what you were looking for. This will help you make the necessary adjustments to ensure the user’s experience is as good as it can be.
Conversion Optimization
If you’ve ever shopped online, you might have noticed that some websites are much easier to navigate, while others seem a little complicated. The reason behind this is conversion optimization, or getting the user to take the desired action, in this case making a purchase.
You can use many tools to analyze and optimize your website or app’s conversion rate. You’ll need to set a specific goal for what you’re trying to achieve, such as increasing the number of sales or getting more traffic from social media. Once you’ve set your goal, you can use tools like Google’s Optimize tool to track the performance of your website or app.
With every new update to Google’s algorithm, digital marketing tools get more complex. With every passing year, the number of tools specifically designed for SEOs to analyze and manage their campaigns easily grows. With these tools, setting up a new campaign is as simple as 1-2-3.
To succeed in the future of travel, you’ll need to be able to optimize for all of these elements.