4 Tips to Win Black Friday in 2024

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August 21, 2024 by and

Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are often the biggest revenue-producing periods for hotels. With increasing competition and more companies fighting for your guests' wallets in 2024, planning your Black Friday strategy early is key to having a successful weekend (or week) once November rolls around.
 
Here, our team of hotel digital marketing experts will share some of the best tips and tricks for making the most of Black Friday.

  1. Kick off Black Friday early this year

Every year, Black Friday seems to come earlier and earlier. What was once a 4 day rush from Friday to Monday has become a multi-week long sale period spanning from early to late November.

There’s more to this than just beating your competitors to the punch this year though: in our increasingly algorithm-driven marketing environment, your ads need more than just 4 days to optimize and deliver the best results. Getting data early on what ads are performing the best, allowing algorithms to optimize who is seeing your ads, and making key adjustments are all possible only when your sale period is longer than 4 days.

The short:

  • Extend your Cyber Sale to at least 7 days, ending on Cyber Monday.
  • Extending your sale past Cyber Monday usually doesn’t drive additional conversions.
  • Although we recommend a minimum of 7 days, some of our most successful campaigns have been for Cyber sales longer than 14 days.
  1. Avoid high CPMs by leveraging first-party data and cyber sale teasers

With Black Friday advertising spend increasing 55% from 2022 to 2023, the competition for ad space on our platforms is increasing every year. In 2023, we saw CPMs increase for some hotel properties by 5 times their average non-sale period. These high CPMs make it harder to reach potential guests at a time they’re already being bombarded with more ads than usual. 

These CPMs are especially high just before and on Cyber Weekend. By running Cyber Sale teasers and email collection campaigns in early November before CPMs rise, you can engage new customers interested in your sale and collect their emails to re-engage them during your sale period, avoiding spending most of your budget at the most expensive time to advertise.

The short:

  • Find ways to engage your customers outside of paid media, like email.
  • Leverage low CPMs before Cyber Weekend to build anticipation and collect new email signups for Early Access to your cyber sale.
  • Expect CPMs to rise during Cyber Weekend: plan for fewer impressions with the same spend and consider increasing spend accordingly.
  1. Offer a percent discount and avoid narrow hotel stay dates

As we’ve covered, your prospective guests are seeing new offers from their favorite brands for almost all of November. Contrived offers with different savings for different stay durations, narrow stay dates, and many exclusions confuse customers and make them skip to the next company. Across our sales, we consistently see that campaigns with the clearest offer and fewest exclusions far outperform other offers.

The short:

  • Keep it simple. A 20% off offer is easier for your customers to understand than a Third Night Free offer, even if savings are better with the latter.
  • Multiple stay date exclusions just confuse customers, especially if they aren’t outlined clearly. If a customer can’t find your offered rate easily for the stay dates they prefer, they’re likely to just leave your website – not keep searching.
  1. Use your platform’s features

If your Cyber Sale strategy is to just launch a couple ads on one platform, you’re missing out on a variety of features available on both Search and social. On social, test out adding reminders to your posts for your sale to deliver a notification to your guests when your sale goes live. Although countdowns aren’t available natively on Meta’s ad platforms, consider scheduling ads to update for the last few days of your sale emphasizing that your offer is about to end.

On search, consider doing a full ad takeover instead of just launching sitelink extensions. In addition to ad takeovers, add countdowns to your search ads within copy and headlines to drive a sense of urgency, especially as your sale comes to a close. Using images to mirror your social and display campaigns can also drive visual interest while posts on Yext, Google My Business, and Bing Places can help the people who care the most about your hotel find your sale easily.

Consider setting up a Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar event that users can add to their calendar from your email sends. This is a great way to get out of the inbox and reach your customers in a unique way once your sale begins. Here’s a guide on how to do that in Google Calendar.

The short: 

  • Use new features your competitors aren’t using to bring attention to your sale.
  • Countdowns, reminders, and events are all great ways to create a sense of urgency while reminders and events can be a great way to get into your guests’ notifications when your sale begins.
  • Don’t be afraid to experiment!

It may not seem like it now, but the end of year cyber sales are just around the corner. Now’s the time to start making a plan for your Cyber Sale. Reach out to GCommerce to help reach more guests and supercharge your marketing this Black Friday.

Which Ad Preformed Best? Can you Guess?

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June 18, 2024 by

Facebook ads are a powerful tool for businesses to reach their target audience through personalized and engaging content, but selecting the perfect elements for an ad is like finding the missing puzzle piece to campaign success.

Take a look at these Facebook ad variations and see if you can guess which one outperformed the others? Discover more here.

Google Marketing Live 2024: Key Takeaways from the GCommerce Team

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May 29, 2024 by

Every year, the marketing industry eagerly awaits Google Marketing Live, Google’s annual event to showcase what’s new in the world of Google advertising. While this year seemed to focus on e-commerce and retail heavily, there were still a lot of announcements and features that got us excited about what’s to come. Discover our key takeaways from Google Marketing Live 2024 below.

By Jaylene Van Lin, Marketing Specialist

Develop ads that adhere to your brand standards

Later this year, you'll be able to supply Google AI with your brand guidelines, such as your colors and fonts, to create ads that reflect your brand across multiple formats and channels. You'll also have the option to upload sample images, enabling generative AI to produce new images that match your visual style. Furthermore, you can use the "Generate more like this" feature to create additional on-brand variants of your successful assets.

By Morgan Tuohy, Senior Marketing Strategist

Take your AI-generated creative to other platforms

While using Google’s tools to create new creative assets, you retain the rights to use those assets across other platforms, including those not owned by Google. While other platforms lag behind Google on the move to AI-generated creative assets, you can maintain brand consistency and save time by taking assets from one platform to another.

By Alex Scharpf, Search Marketing Supervisor

Don’t underestimate short-form

Google is pushing towards YouTube Shorts more than ever, and the format is growing in terms of both engagement and viewership. As Google continues to provide more in-depth ways to monetize Shorts, vertical image assets and short-form video content will become even more important in the upcoming years. And because travel-based content already has a strong presence on Shorts, skipping these assets as a hotel may leave valuable customer interactions on the table.

By Maddie Holifeild, Marketing Specialist

Google Gemini has the potential to be a powerful tool for hoteliers

While presenting at this year’s keynote, Philipp Schindler touched on the developments of Google Gemini, an AI assistant that provides access to Google AI. With a tool like this, Hoteliers can analyze large datasets to understand customer preferences and behavior patterns. This will allow hotels to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns, offers, and recommendations like dining options, specific room types, and local attractions based on a guest’s previous stays or preferences. With AI on the rise, there is also an opportunity to enhance customer service through advanced chatbots and virtual assistants that can handle a wide range of inquiries, from booking reservations and answering questions about amenities. 

By Meaghan Reynolds, Marketing Specialist

Google’s new brand profiles will help enhance hotels' online presence

Google’s introduction of new brand profiles and AI branding tools empowers businesses to showcase their unique brand identities more effectively. These tools will allow merchants to showcase and highlight key information with new and compelling visuals as well as using AI to effortlessly create engaging content. For Hotels, this is a great opportunity to feature new imagery, positive guest experiences, and videos directly in a search result. This new AI tool can allow hotels to generate new and engaging content which will help to enhance their marketing efforts and attract more potential guests.

By Alex Horrocks, Search Marketing Strategist

The Power Pair

At Google Marketing Live, the "Power Pair" strategy was highlighted, combining broad match keywords inside Paid Search Campaigns alongside Performance Max. While it's well-known that advertisers often prefer exact and phrase match keywords for higher quality traffic, Google shared data showing that Power Pair could boost conversions by 27%. As advertisers, we constantly test new strategies, but this approach might not suit smaller businesses. Paid search tends to be more effective with targeted campaigns rather than broad approaches for smaller businesses. If you decide to implement the Power Pair strategy, ensure you leverage your other tools by optimizing audiences, demographics, and bid modifiers to avoid unnecessary spending

By Lisa McGivney, Director of Marketing

Google will prioritize ads in AI overviews

The search community has long guessed that the only way Google would roll out GenAI into the live results would be if they found a way to maintain ad revenue. During Google Marketing Live 2024, they confirmed that although historically ads have only appeared above and below the overviews, they will now be testing ads within the AI Overviews. It will be interesting to see how this evolves and what type (if any) of reporting they offer to show the performance of ads within AI Overviews. We’ll be ready.

By Jael Dugdale, Metadesk Operations Team Lead

Embracing AI and intent-based searches

As AI takes center stage at Google Marketing Live 2024, the future of SEO is being reshaped. Google emphasized a shift from specific keywords to user intent, with more complex searches—often five or more words—becoming the norm. Where complex searches once required multiple steps, AI now provides comprehensive options in a single query. For example, a search for “fun places to eat in Monterey” can now yield clusters of results like reviews, sunset views, and seafood havens. Google Lens also enables easy identification of objects with a simple point-and-shoot. So, what’s next? Ads and organic search results will change, requiring SEO strategies to adapt. Beyond keywords, SEO should focus on intent-based searches, are they a seafood haven? Making sure their alt text identifies objects in images correctly, color, size, etc. providing relevant, concise content, and making sure they continue to highlight their Long-Term Sustainable Competitive Advantages (LTSCA) to stand out in future AI-driven searches.

By Kristina Webber, Marketing Specialist

First-party data is critical to advertising on Google 

Having good AI requires good data. At Google Marketing Live, AI was mentioned frequently. However, having the right first-party data to fuel successful campaigns will help drive conversions more cost-effectively. To assist with this, Google announced a new feature: Measurement Diagnostics. This feature can evaluate your website and gather data by diagnosing missing data or opportunities that can be used to understand your audience through first-party insights.

By Nikki Abrego, Marketing Strategist

When will Power Pair take advantage of travel? 

During the Google Live session, they introduced a game-changing feature, Power Pair. This feature combines search and performance campaigns to deliver the strongest data performance of ROI across all of Google, enhancing visual search. They demonstrated this with a retail example: a consumer snaps a picture of a suitcase, and search results populate with similar products. This got me thinking about the exciting possibilities we could explore for our clients and how this could significantly enhance our advertising strategies with hotels and travel.

Instead of taking pictures of products, users could upload an image of an aesthetic room or an environment they aspire to be in. For instance, if someone uploads a picture of a beach with a palm tree, our hotel client, The Cove, could appear in the search results with their villas providing that similar view. Or, if an image of a dark romance room aesthetic is uploaded, our client, Crossroads, could pop up with matching aesthetic suites available to book. By feeding images into Power Pair, this feature could encourage customers to book travel based on the visuals they have seen or saved on their Pinterest travel boards. 

By Kaylin Long, Search Marketing Specialist

More choice for consumers means more opportunities for advertisers

People are starting to search in new ways—they’re asking more complex questions, searching with images, etc. All of these different ways that a consumer can search mean that the consumer has more choice, which means more opportunities for advertisers. Google is implementing more ways to implement shopping and metasearch-type ads that will be more relevant to our consumers. AI powered by Google will deliver the most relevant results to our consumers, bringing in more qualified leads and a higher ROAS.

What Are the Most Popular Hotel Offers?

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April 17, 2024 by

We frequently get asked what are the most popular hotel offers. While we could have relied on educated guesses from client and team member feedback, we opted to dive into the data for concrete answers.

Our analysis of rate plan categories across our entire portfolio revealed some fascinating insights.

  1. Loyalty is gold

Outside of the standard BAR (best available rate), rates categorized under loyalty were the most commonly booked across our portfolio. We defined loyalty as any rate code booked as part of a loyalty/signup program such as email, SMS, or via member program rates like iPrefer, Stash Rewards, and Guestbook. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 5-star luxury resort or a smaller 2-star boutique hotel; these offer types drive bookings. Make sure you’re nurturing your most loyal customers and members, as well as finding ways to grow those lists - including incentives to sign up.

  1. Resort guests want to Stay & Play

We work with a lot of resort properties that feature amenities such as spas, dining, golf, and more. The 2nd most common rate type booked fell into a category we named “Stay & Play”. These offers included lodging plus credits to use at other outlets around the resorts. If your hotel has multiple entities or amenities on site, craft a package that entices the guests to enjoy them. It also helps advertising campaigns paint an experiential picture of how the potential guest can enjoy their time on the property.

  1. Consumers are swayed by discount deals

While we don’t think this is very surprising news, discount offers also topped the list for most commonly booked across our portfolio of clients. The most commonly booked being 25% off, followed by 35% and then 30% off. Our data shows these types of offers are less common at the 5-star luxury level, but used sparingly they can help drive bookings during need periods for all levels of hotels.

  1. We all want guests to linger longer

Who doesn’t love some great alliteration? Linger Longer, X night free, extend your stay - no matter what it’s called, it’s all centered around the same goal. This common goal that many hotel clients come to us with is trying to increase their average length of stay among guests. This is a big driver behind the widespread popularity of length of stay focused offers. These can include offering a free night when a guest books 3, 4, or more nights or focusing on a % discount when they book a certain number of nights. Play around with both approaches to see what resonates best with your guests.

  1. Seasonal Offers + Flash Sales

Consumers are conditioned to look for seasonal offers during holidays. In response, hotels are frequently offering discounts and other flash sales to capitalize on these periods when consumers are primed to purchase. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 5-star luxury resort or a 2-star hotel - these offer types are used across the board. These types of offers such as summer specials, 72 flash sales and Cyber promotions round out our top list of most commonly used and booked hotel offers.

Honorable mentions and other hotel offer ideas

Outside of the most commonly booked hotel offers from our portfolio. We also wanted to give a nod to some other great hotel offers that can help move the needle and produce stays during hotel need periods.

  1. Resident/Local rates

We see states like Florida lead the charge when it comes to deals for locals, but any hotel can capitalize on this type of offer. We saw staycations spike during the COVID era but they are still wildly popular. These can especially be helpful during off-season months as ways to fill your hotel or resort.

  1. Bed & Breakfast packages

Maybe it’s because consumers are motivated by their stomachs or maybe it’s because they want the ease of waking up and not having to hunt down breakfast options - but whichever the reason, this type of offer seems to be a mainstay in the industry. If you have on-site dining and the ability to package breakfast with a lodging rate, make sure to include this on your website offerings.

  1. AAA/AARP

AAA has a whopping 60 million members, while AARP claims 38 million members. This huge database of consumers is conditioned to seek out hotels that offer them discounts. A deep dive into the data shows that across our entire portfolio, these remain one of the most commonly booked rate types across every type of property, from large resorts to luxury properties and boutique hotels.

These are just a sampling of hotel offers and package types to inspire you as you craft the perfect package and offer strategy for your hotel based on the unique needs and amenities of your hotel. Please reach out if you are interested in diving deeper into your own GA4 data for custom insights and recommendations.

Effective Strategies to Increase Your Hotel’s Direct Bookings 

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March 28, 2024 by

In the highly competitive hospitality industry, increasing direct bookings is crucial for hotels and other accommodation providers. Direct bookings not only help you reduce reliance on third-party online travel agencies (OTAs) but also allow you to establish a direct relationship with your guests, resulting in better customer satisfaction and increased profits. To help you maximize your direct bookings, we've compiled a list of effective strategies that can give your business a boost.

Optimize your Hotel’s Website

Your hotel’s website serves as the face of your property, and it's often the first point of contact for potential guests. Make sure your website is visually appealing, user-friendly, and optimized for mobile devices. Ensure that the booking process is simple and straightforward, with clear calls to action. Highlight the unique features, amenities, and benefits of booking directly on your site, such as exclusive offers or loyalty programs.

Offer Competitive Rates and Value-Added Perks

To entice guests to book directly, provide competitive rates that are at least on par with OTA prices. Consider offering exclusive discounts, packages, or value-added perks such as complimentary breakfast, Wi-Fi, or room upgrades for direct bookings. Emphasize these benefits on your website to encourage guests to choose your property over others.

Leverage Social Media Platforms

Engage with your hotel’s audience on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Regularly share compelling content, including enticing images, videos, and stories that showcase your property's unique offerings. Run targeted ad campaigns to reach potential guests and promote direct bookings by highlighting the advantages of booking through your hotel’s website.

Implement a Robust Hotel Email Marketing Strategy

Build and maintain a database of past and potential guests, and leverage email marketing to stay connected with them. Send personalized emails with exclusive offers, seasonal promotions, and upcoming events. Use automation tools to send booking reminders, post-stay follow-ups, and personalized recommendations. Make sure your hotel’s emails provide value and maintain a consistent brand voice to nurture guest loyalty.

Invest in Hotel Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optimize your hotel’s website for search engines to improve its visibility and drive organic traffic. Identify relevant keywords and incorporate them naturally into your website's content, titles, and meta descriptions. Develop informative and engaging blog posts related to your destination or local attractions. Encourage guest reviews and testimonials, as they not only contribute to your SEO efforts but also build trust and credibility with potential guests.

Provide Exceptional Guest Experiences

Deliver exceptional experiences that exceed guest expectations. Train your staff to provide warm, personalized service and ensure that guest feedback and concerns are addressed promptly. Encourage satisfied guests to share their experiences through online reviews and testimonials, which can have a significant impact on future bookings. Positive word-of-mouth is a powerful driver for direct bookings.

Implement a Direct Booking Incentive Program

Create a hotel loyalty program that rewards guests for booking directly with you. Offer exclusive benefits such as room upgrades, late check-out, or discounts on future stays. These incentives not only encourage direct bookings but also foster guest loyalty, as guests feel valued and appreciated for their continued support.

Collaborate with Local Businesses and Influencers

Forge partnerships with local businesses, attractions, or influencers who can help promote your property to their audiences. Offer special discounts or packages for joint promotions, collaborate on social media content, or host events together. By leveraging the reach and influence of these partners, you can expand your brand's visibility and attract new guests.

Increasing your hotel’s direct bookings requires a multifaceted approach that focuses on optimizing your website, leveraging digital marketing channels, providing exceptional guest experiences, and offering value-added incentives. By implementing these effective strategies, you can reduce your reliance on OTAs, build a loyal customer base, and drive higher profitability for your accommodation business. Remember, a well-rounded approach coupled with continuous adaptation and improvement will yield the best results in the long run.

Need additional help increasing your direct bookings? Check out Metadesk.

LinkedIn Static vs Video Results- Lead Generation Advertising For Hotels

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March 5, 2024 by

In May, we utilized LinkedIn advertising campaigns to promote a member’s club through lead generation for one of our hotel clients. There are many ad types to choose from when advertising on LinkedIn, including static, messaging ads, carousels, videos, text ads, and more.  🏨💼

We decided to put static ads and video ads to the test. View our findings and which ads were more successful in our full mini case study, here. 🏆😎

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