Google Business Posts for Hotels: Guidelines and Restrictions

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December 4, 2024 by

What are Google Business posts?

Google Business Posts can cover a variety of topics, with post types including “Events,” “Offers,” and the open-ended “Update.” These posts appear as part of your hotel’s Google Business Profile listing, showing in both Maps and the standard Google results page.

Here’s an example of an “Update” and “Events” post on the general results page. 

Every post type is a little different, but each one offers a number of optional call-to-action buttons, such as “Learn more” and “Order online,” as well as the option to add an eye-catching image of your property, restaurant, spa and more. 

To see why you should be using Google Business posts for your hotel, check out this blog post where we put them to the test.

How to post on Google Business Profile

Google Business posts can be added from your hotel’s Google Business Profile by clicking the “Add update” button.

From there, you will be prompted to select your type of post. This choice should relate to the content of your post, but the restrictions on certain post types may also play a factor. 

Elements and restrictions of each Google Business post type

Update

This post type has the fewest restrictions, making it the perfect choice for all-around posts about your hotel that may not fit other types.

Must include:

  • Description (Max 1500 characters)

May optionally include:

  • Photos and/or videos (Up to 10 combined)
  • Action button such as “Learn more” or “Book” which links to a specified URL

Event

This post type is best for events with a clear start and end time.

Must include:

  • Title (Max 58 characters)
  • Start date
  • End date

May optionally include:

  • Photos and/or videos (Up to 10 combined)
  • Start and end times
  • Description (Max 1500 characters)
  • Action button such as “Learn more” or “Book” which links to a specified URL

Other restrictions:

  • Start and end times must be used in tandem. If one is added, you must add the other.
  • If times are not specified, Google will display a start time of 12:00AM and an end time of 11:59PM.

Offers

This post type is a great way to promote your hotel’s limited-time offers and specials.

Must include:

  • Title (Max 58 characters)
  • Start date
  • End date
  • Action button is automatically added

May optionally include:

  • Photos and/or videos (Up to 10 combined)
  • Description (Max 1500 characters)
  • Coupon code
  • Link to a specified URL
  • Terms and conditions (Max 5,000 characters)

Google Business posts are an easy and flexible way to promote your hotel’s events, offers, and features. While there are some format restrictions for each post type, the variety of Google Business post types available allow plenty of opportunities to post a wide range of content. And along with the evidence from our previous blog that Google Business posts may increase your hotel’s visibility, there’s no reason not to try them out.

For more information on Google Business posts, contact GCommerce.

Why Your Hotel Is Probably Running Too Many Facebook Ads

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December 2, 2024 by

One of the most overlooked factors that can make or break your hotel’s Facebook marketing campaigns is the number of ads you run at any given time. While on the surface, it may seem like it’s beneficial to always run more ads, offers, and campaigns than your competitors, a spray-and-pray approach will almost always bring worse results than an effective, controlled hotel ad campaign strategy.

What we’re talking about today has a lot to do with the conversation around ad frequency we posted earlier this year. We’d recommend giving that blog post a read first, but if you don’t have time, here’s a short synopsis:

In order for your hotel’s ad messaging to stick with your target audience, your audience has to see the same message between 2 and 10 times. Running too many hotel ad campaigns to a large audience ends up diluting your messaging, wasting ad dollars, and confusing your customers. It’s important to keep this frequency number in mind when planning your campaigns.

Why shouldn’t our hotel run as many offers/ads as possible?

On the surface, running more hotel offers and ads seems to make sense. On Facebook, we’re serving ads to diverse audiences, from retired people who can easily accommodate a weekday vacation to parents of young children on a long weekend to young professionals looking for a romantic date. Doesn’t it make sense to run offers for all of these groups and more?

This thinking often leads to diluted messaging, confused customers, and fewer conversions as a result. Read on to find out why.

What does a good hotel retargeting campaign strategy look like?

In a hotel retargeting campaign, we’re delivering ads to people who have previously shown interest in staying at your hotel or have recently visited your website. These are customers who probably already know who you are but need a push to be reminded why they should actually book a stay. When considering how many ads and offers to run in your hotel’s retargeting campaigns, we have a few guidelines we recommend:

Run six or fewer ads at a time

Running more than 6 ads at a time makes it hard for the Facebook algorithm to learn enough about your ads to deliver them effectively. Don’t believe us? Take it from them. We recommend having a daily budget of at least $5 per ad, if possible. If your daily budget is $15/day, it is probably wiser to run only 3-4 ads.

Run 3 or fewer offers of hotel messaging types

Now that you’re running six or fewer ads, we can talk about offers. We recommend not running more than 3 offers at any given time, giving room for around 2 ads per offer. For example, you might run 2 ads for a 20% savings offer, 2 ads for an extra night offer, and 2 evergreen ads that aren’t tied to offers at all.

This allows Facebook to deliver the same type of messaging to the same user in multiple ways instead of always having to deliver the same ad to a user that might resonate with a 20% savings offer, for example.

Allow your hotel’s Facebook campaigns to optimize before rotating offers

Once you’ve chosen an offer to run, we recommend running the offer for at least 2 weeks, but preferably longer. It can take days for Facebook to optimize a new ad type or offer, so rotating offers weekly only hinders your hotel’s Facebook campaign performance. Be wary of ad fatigue, though; refresh images and copy at least seasonally.

What does this look like?

Consider the following two hotel Facebook ad accounts (with identifying information removed) from September 2024. In the first screenshot, there are 9 individual hotel offers and one hotel press accolade, each with one ad. Note that the ad frequency for 8 of 10 ads is below 2, meaning on average, the target audience is exposed to each offer less than 2 times. This frequency isn’t high enough to drive a substantial number of bookings.

In the second screenshot, the hotel only runs one offer and a handful of evergreen ads. The two hotel offer ads see a frequency of 3.00 and 2.57. There’s some overlap here, so the number of times the average user is exposed to this offer each month across both ads is 3.62 times. Delivering this offer at a high frequency is driving more bookings for the hotel, specifically on the offer this hotel is prioritizing. In addition to our one hotel offer ad, 3 supplemental evergreen ads help to round out our hotel Facebook campaign, providing less sales-focused copy and reminding customers about the experience they’ll have on the property.

This strategy provides clarity for your hotel’s audience with a specific offer or set of offers, without having so many choices they get overwhelmed.

What does a good hotel prospecting campaign strategy look like?

A good hotel prospecting campaign strategy follows similar rules to an optimal retargeting campaign strategy. The only modification for prospecting is instead of delivering different hotel offers, we recommend experimenting with different messaging points while introducing your hotel to new, unaware audiences. These are the guidelines we recommend:

Run six or fewer ads at a time

Just like with retargeting, we recommend running no more than 6 ads at a time. Again, if your hotel’s budget is less than $30/day, sticking to a rule of $5 per day, per ad is a good starting point when deciding how many ads to run.

Run 3 or fewer hotel messaging aypes

Prospecting is a great place to experiment with new ways to introduce your hotel to prospective guests. We see the most success with four main categories of prospecting ads:

  • Evergreen ads
    • These ads mirror the imagery and language on your hotel’s website, how you’d describe the experience of staying at your hotel to a new guest.
  • Review ads
    • Pulling reviews from Google & other websites gives prospective guests confidence they might enjoy their stay and click through to your hotel’s website to find out more.
  • Press ads
    • Maybe Forbes or Travel & Leisure raved about a stay at your hotel. Quotes from reputable press outlets often provide guests with confidence about your hotel and drive interest, similar to review ads.
  • Offer ads
    • Although we see the most success with offer ads in retargeting campaigns, sometimes they’re worth experimenting with, combined with softer, more prospecting-focused language.

What does this look like?

Consider the following screenshot (with identifying information removed) from a hotel experimenting with brand pillar ads, review ads, and evergreen ads. Monthly, this hotel rotates between different brand pillars & reviews, turning off ads that are less successful and testing new concepts to avoid ad fatigue. Although ad spend is concentrated between a few ads, all ads were served at least 2,500 times during the month, allowing Facebook to collect adequate data on what ads are driving the most qualified traffic to the website.

(TLDR) Too long; didn’t read

In short, managing your hotel’s ad volume is one of the most important things you can do to improve your Facebook performance. Here are a couple of tips to keep in mind:

  • Run 6 or fewer ads in any campaign to allow Facebook to best optimize your hotel’s ads
  • Run at least 2 ads for any offer or messaging type so your message can be delivered in multiple ways
  • Rotate ads often (but not too often!) to avoid ad fatigue

You deserve a partner in creating your hotel’s Facebook campaign strategies. Reach out to the experts at GCommerce Solutions to learn more about running highly effective campaigns that help drive more guests to your hotel.

What is Search Impression Share in Google Ads?

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November 19, 2024 by

Analyzing hotel advertising campaigns can be incredibly overwhelming. Each channel has a different set of metrics, and keeping track of what’s what can be hard. 

Search Impression Share in Google Ads is one of those unique metrics that often causes confusion. However, this metric can provide an incredible amount of insight into your hotel’s paid search campaign performance, so it’s important to understand what the metric is, how it’s calculated, and what factors can affect it.

The Google Ads auction system

Before discussing Search Impression Share, it’s helpful to understand how paid search ads are served through Google Ads.

Each time that a user searches for something on Google, the Ads platform enters all potentially relevant ads into an auction for that individual search. Paid search advertising with the best combination of bid and budget, relevance to the search, historical performance, and other factors will win the auction, appearing on the search engine results page (SERP).

If a paid search ad does not perform well in the auction, it will not appear in the SERP. However, that ad may show up another time since a brand new auction occurs for each individual instance of a search.

Multiple ads can appear in the SERP at the same time, with ads that performed best in the auction showing up highest in the list of results compared to their auction competitors. However, there isn’t enough space in the SERP for every paid search ad to show up every time. The main purpose of the Google Ads auction system is to weed out the least effective paid search ads for a specific search. Therefore, it’s important to understand how well your paid search ads compete, which is where Search Impression Share metrics come into play.

Search Impression Share

Search Impression Share measures how often your hotel’s paid search ads win an entered auction, representing the proportion of impressions actually received compared to potential impressions.

How Search Impression Share is calculated in Google Ads

Search Impression Share = Actual Impressions / Potential Impressions

Or, in other words: Search Impression Share = Auctions Won / Auctions Entered

You can think of this metric as an “actual” or “visible” percentage for paid search ads.

Search Impression Share Lost to Rank

This metric represents how often your hotel’s paid search ads lose an auction because a competitor’s ads are deemed a better, more relevant fit for the user’s search.

Factors that may affect Search Impression Share Lost to Rank:

Ad copy keyword optimization: When setting up a paid search campaign in Google Ads, adding positive keywords helps inform Google about the kind of searches that your ads should compete to show up for. These targeted keywords are not always a one-to-one match with a user’s query, but they provide a great foundation to ensure that your hotel’s ads appear in relevant searches.

However, targeted keywords aren’t always enough. Google Ads likes to see proof that your paid search ads are immediately relevant to a search and often looks at ad copy to determine relevance. Therefore, incorporating targeted keywords into ad messaging is an easy way to improve this relevance and decrease Search Impression Share Lost to Rank.

Search context: While targeted keywords are a great start regarding relevance, sometimes intent can get lost in a user’s search. Specific words and phrases often have a number of meanings, and this can get confusing without a direct line of communication to the user. For example, if a user searches for “cats,” it’s difficult to determine whether the user wants to adopt a pet, see a Broadway show, or buy heavy machinery.

Google Ads is fairly accurate in determining context to avoid serving irrelevant ads, but this doesn’t always prevent advertisers from being entered into irrelevant auctions. If your hotel’s paid search campaigns target keywords with a large variety of potential meanings, your Search Impression Share Lost to Rank may be inflated due to this broader pool of auctions in which your ads are competing.

Landing page experience: Because Google Ads can monitor ad performance beyond the click, the URL your paid search ads redirect to is just as important as the ad itself. Google Ads does not want to serve ads that provide a poor user experience post-click.

If your paid search audience routinely exits the page early, leaves without interacting with your website, or otherwise displays poor engagement, this could hurt Search Impression Share lost to Rank. Landing pages with excessively slow loading times, inconsistent reliability, and other undesirable qualities could also have a negative effect, even if these factors don’t directly impact your audience’s behavior.

Expected Clickthrough Rate (CTR): Because Google Ads wants to provide the best experience for users, the platform prioritizes paid search ads with high performance. Based on past data from your account as well as other advertisers, Google Ads can predict a paid search ad’s CTR within a specific search. 

A high expected CTR suggests that a paid search ad is highly relevant, increasing the chances of winning auctions and improving Search Impression Share Lost to Rank. However, if Google Ads does not expect a paid search ad to perform well, this could negatively impact relevance in auctions and, therefore, Search Impression Share Lost to Rank. 

Search Impression Share Lost to Budget

This metric represents how often your paid search ads lose an auction due to an insufficiently low daily campaign budget or Cost-per-click (CPC) bid.

Factors that may affect Search Impression Share Lost to Budget:

Bid strategy: Google Ads offers a variety of automated bid strategies to assist with auction bidding. These strategies inform Google Ads about the primary goal of your paid search campaigns, such as maximizing visibility or maximizing conversions, allowing the platform’s algorithm to tailor bids most effectively for each individual auction. 

Each bid strategy is incredibly unique since each goal requires a different focus. Some bid strategies, such as “Maximize Conversion Value,” may end up prioritizing a low CPC bid to keep cost down, worsening Search Impression Share Lost to Budget as a result. Other strategies, though, such as “Target Impression Share”, may put very little focus on manageable CPCs, which could actually improve Search Impression Share Lost to Budget. 

Total campaign budget: When running paid search campaigns, it’s a good idea to keep costs somewhat consistent over a given time frame. Budget should be spread out evenly across multiple hours, multiple days, or multiple months, which can impact the competitiveness of CPC bids. 

For campaigns with higher total budgets, this allows more room to increase CPC bids. As these bids increase, your hotel’s ads are less likely to lose auctions due to budgetary restrictions, decreasing Search Impression Share Lost to Budget. But, of course, the inverse is true as well. With a limited daily budget, your paid search campaigns may be more prone to under-bidding, resulting in a higher Search Impression Share Lost to Budget.

Bid adjustments: Google Ads provides the opportunity to manually prioritize the most important audiences for your hotel’s paid search campaigns. Bid adjustments work in tandem with bid strategies and other CPC settings, increasing or decreasing baseline auction bids by a given percent. Negative and positive bid adjustments primarily apply to attributes of the user performing a search, such as their demographics, interests, and hobbies, or the device type they’re using. 

Because bid adjustments are a modifier applied to a baseline auction bid, these settings can have either a positive or negative effect on Search Impression Share Lost to Budget. When using a large number of positive bid adjustments, this metric may decrease since CPC bids are more aggressive than the baseline for a large amount of auctions. Although this also means that negative bid adjustments can increase Search Impression Share Lost to Budget, since CPCs will be less competitive in those instances.

Maximum CPC settings: As part of Google Ads’ initiative to provide advertisers with more control, the platform allows for optional maximum bid settings. When added to a paid search account, these settings can ensure that CPCs remain reasonable by preventing bids from rising past a desired limit.

While these settings can help control campaign costs, it’s important to understand the potential tradeoff. If your paid search campaigns include maximum CPC settings that are less than the average price of an auction in your market, this can end up throttling your auction performance and causing an increase in Search Impression Share Lost to Budget.

Optimizing for Search Impression Share

Because each metric related to Search Impression Share results from so many factors, there’s really no baseline for what a “good” number will look like. Every business has different paid search campaign goals, unique market competition, and individual budget restraints, so there’s no “one size fits all” answer. 

Despite this, there are still a few standard optimization rules to follow regarding Search Impression Share.

1. Aim to decrease Search Impression Share Lost to Rank

Because Search Impression Share Lost to Rank deals with ad relevance, most of the factors behind this metric are relatively easy to adjust with controlled optimization, making it possible to improve account performance without re-budgeting for your advertising channels.

2. Increase campaign budgets

Once your paid search campaigns are well-optimized, Search Impression Share Lost to Budget is the next metric to tackle. While the factors behind CPCs are slightly more complex than those behind ad relevance, increasing campaign budgets allows the flexibility for higher bids, acting as a simple way to gain a competitive edge in auctions.

3. Remember metric interactions

However, Search Impression Share Lost to Rank and Search Impression Share Lost to Budget are directly proportional to each other. When added together, actual Search Impression Share, Search Impression Share Lost to Rank, and Search Impression Share Lost to Budget will always add up to 100%. So, if one metric decreases, the others will increase, and vice versa.

4. Focus on visibility

Due to this proportional relationship, it may seem like an optimization related to Search Impression Share actually had a negative effect on the account. In reality, though, improving bids or relevance simply shifts the balance in one direction or the other. Therefore, focusing on total visibility paints a better picture of general performance. As long as the actual Search Impression Share remains flat or continues to improve, it’s safe to assume that your optimization techniques are working.

In summary

Search Impression Share in Google Ads is an incredibly complex web of factors that can tell you a lot about your hotel’s paid search campaigns. If you’ve been ignoring this metric, we suggest that you take a deeper look at your own campaigns to better understand how your advertising works and how to potentially optimize them in the future.


If you have more questions about Search Impression Share reach out now.

Where Ultrarunning and Hotel Digital Marketing Collide

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November 13, 2024 by

This is a blog post I was first asked to write over 2 years ago but never finished. It wasn’t because I got distracted or forgot; there just wasn’t a compelling story there at the time. 2 years and 4,000 miles of running later, and I think I finally have something to write about here.

This version of the story starts early last year on a drive with my dad. I told him about how I was having a really hard time doing hard things. Taking on difficult tasks is something I’ve prided myself on for a long time, but after a few big life changes, graduating college, and taking my first ‘real’ job, doing hard things had become so much more difficult. I found it difficult to motivate myself to run as much as I did in college, I found it difficult to challenge myself at work, everything was just… harder than it used to be.

Last summer, I took a step back and focused on the little things. I had become too focused on doing the biggest runs, delivering the best hotel marketing campaigns, being the best at everything. Instead, I went on more neighborhood runs for 3 miles instead of 13 and delivered more hotel marketing campaigns with the goal of learning something instead of trying to learn everything. 

It was shortly after that last year where hard things became a whole lot easier. I ran 2 and a half hours faster in a 50k race than I had the year before, and the hotel digital marketing campaigns I was in charge of at work were driving more revenue than they ever had since I had taken them over. I ran through the entire winter (in one of the snowiest ski towns in California) – through blizzards and in the dark during evenings after work. This spring, I ran my 10th Los Angeles Marathon, a 17-minute personal-record from my previous best in 2017. This summer, I ran my first 100k, and this past fall, I placed 14th in my local 50k race with over 600 participants.

That 50k race was the same race that had prompted GCommerce to ask me to write this blog back in 2022 when I placed 163rd with a time of almost 9 hours. This year, I finished in 5 hours and 9 minutes. Oh, and hotel digital marketing work has gone great too.

It’s not the ‘doing hard things’ part that brought all of those successes, but rather doing small, easier things a lot. 

The desire to always do something greater and better every single day brings a lot of paralysis when it comes to just doing anything. I’ve found that to be true in not just running but just about everything, especially hotel digital marketing. 

We tend to get caught up in the glitz and glamor of wanting every hotel marketing campaign to be an award winner driving record results, and so often miss the opportunities to make incremental improvements day over day and week over week. Things like launching new hotel marketing ads every other week instead of every other month or avoiding new hotel marketing targeting strategies for fear they won’t change anything. 

Doing those small things isn’t just an important part of our jobs, but it might be the most important part of our jobs. Without those small improvements and perfecting the foundations of the hotel marketing campaigns we run, those out-of-the-park home runs are a lot more rare (or never come at all). 

Being successful at the hard things requires doing the easy things daily. Running 60 miles well requires a lot of 3-mile runs, just like delivering award-winning hotel marketing campaigns requires a lot of really little incremental improvements year-round. 

You’ll never get the first without the second.

Ad Frequency: Why It Matters and How You Can Control It 

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November 12, 2024 by

It feels like the most common advertising trope always follows the same structure:


“Your customer needs to see your ads [4/5/6/7/146] times in order to [remember you/make a purchase/some other desired action]”. 

This statement might make sense logically, but what does it actually mean and how do we control it?

The answer to these questions can be found by looking at this metric: Frequency. 

Frequency is actually easy to understand and calculate. Frequency is the number of times a user has seen your ad or campaign in a certain period of time. In order to find frequency, you divide impressions by reach. 

For example, let’s say your campaign had 100,000 impressions this month and reached 20,000 people. Your frequency is 5.00, meaning that the average person your campaign reached saw your marketing materials five times. Some may have seen it four times, while others may have had six exposures, but it all averages out to five.

  • Impressions/reach
    • 100,000/20,000 = 5.00

What’s a good frequency?

A desirable frequency primarily depends on the goals of your campaign. For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to focus on Meta advertising on Facebook and Instagram, but a lot of these concepts transfer over to other platforms you’re advertising on.

For a prospecting campaign where we’re hoping to drive website traffic or website engagement, a good frequency to target is 1 to 2.5. 

In our campaigns, we’ve seen that a frequency higher than about 2.5 results in a reduced clickthrough rate and less website traffic that can be used to serve ads that drive bookings later. 

If your frequency is approaching 2.5, it is a good sign that your prospecting targeting is too narrow for your budget; try targeting a larger geographic region, more age groups, or more interest groups in order to increase the reach of your campaign.

For a retargeting campaign where we’re driving conversions on a hotel’s booking engine, the range of a good frequency is a little broader, from 2.5 to 9. 

Out of an analysis of 80 retargeting campaigns during Q2 of this year, we identified some key insights: 

  • 19 retargeting campaigns were identified as high performers with a ROAS (return on ad spend) in excess of $50:1.
    • Out of those 19 high-performing campaigns, 17 had frequencies between 2.5 and 7. The remaining 2 campaigns had frequencies of 9.8 and 10.7. 
  • No campaigns with a frequency of less than 2.5 broke the $50:1 threshold to be identified as a high-performing campaign.
  • The remaining 20 retargeting campaigns with a frequency of less than 2.5.
    • 10 were identified as low-performing campaigns with room to improve. 50% of campaigns in this frequency range falling in the bottom tier performance is higher than any other campaigns within a given frequency range. 
  • For example, campaigns with a frequency above 2.5 had only 16% in the bottom tier of performance. Don’t let your frequency get too high, though; data indicates that frequencies above about 12 produce conversions at a much lower rate.

That said, a high frequency only unlocks the possibility of high performance; it doesn’t guarantee it. Successful campaigns still presented great offers, high performing individual ads, and followed our best practices for facebook ad optimization.

How do we manipulate frequency?

Now that we know what frequency in our conversion campaigns we want to target, we have to look at how to get there.

Increasing frequency
If your campaign’s frequency falls below 2.5, you likely aren’t reaching the same people often enough to drive them to convert. If that’s the case, we need to look at either increasing impressions while keeping reach static or decreasing reach while keeping impressions static.

In order to increase impressions, we can add additional budget while keeping our target audience the same. For example, if our current target audience has 20,000 users and we are only serving 40,000 impressions (a frequency of 2), an increase of 25% of impressions to 50,000 should let us reach our target frequency of 2.5.

  • Impressions/reach
    • 40,000/20,000 = 2.00
  • Impressions/reach
    • 50,000/20,000 = 2.5

If the budget is inflexible, we can look at decreasing reach. In order to do this, we’ll shorten the amount of time a website visitor remains on our retargeting lists, maybe from 30 days to 20 days. In the example above, we’d still maintain our 40,000 impressions since our budget is the same, but our reach could decrease to 14,000 (about ⅔), leading to a frequency of 2.8. Although you may be missing out on conversions from the 20-30 day audience, the data indicates that the increased frequency of ad delivery to recent website visitors outweighs these potential losses.

Decreasing frequency

If your campaign frequency falls above 12, you are likely reaching the same people too often and being less efficient than you could be with your ad spend. If that’s the case, we need to increase reach while keeping impressions static.

To decrease frequency and drive higher performance, we need to reach additional users by increasing the size of our retargeting lists. For example, we could push additional budget to prospecting campaigns to fill the top of the funnel more, increasing the size of our website visitor list. We could also begin to target past guests who haven’t visited our website recently, increasing our pool of potential guests to deliver ads to. Finally, we could increase the duration that users remain on our website visitor list.

At the end of the day, frequency is just one of the tools we have to optimize Facebook campaigns. While having a frequency in our recommended range might unlock higher performance, it’s still important to pay attention to the quality of your offers, imagery, and copy so that your additional impressions don’t go to waste.

Your hotel deserves an agency that looks at all the details of your campaigns. Get in touch with GCommerce to see where your campaigns can take you. 

Get Ready for the 2024-25 Ski Season: Digital Marketing Tips for Resorts and Hotels Near the Slopes

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November 5, 2024 by

As the 2024-25 ski season approaches, the weather has been unpredictable. However, there's no need to worry; whether it's powder or sunny days, we have ski hotel digital marketing strategies to keep your property top of mind.

If you're a ski resort or a hotel close to the slopes, here’s how to keep your hotel’s digital marketing fresh and effective all ski season long.

1. Make your ski hotel’s content weather-ready

The weather is always changing. One day, it’s snowing, and the next day, it’s sunny. Make sure your hotel’s content is as flexible as the weather. Use videos, social posts, and landing pages highlighting different activities based on conditions: snow days on the slopes, cozy fireside vibes, or winter hikes.

Actionable item: Develop hotel content that showcases your property no matter the weather. Whether it’s powder days at the resort or a warm, sunny afternoon near your hotel, you want to stay relevant.

2. Focus on local and niche search keywords 

Forget the broad search terms like “best ski resorts” or “ski vacations”—they’re highly competitive. Instead, focus on local, long-tail keywords to attract guests searching for nearby experiences.

Actionable item: Use phrases like “ski resorts near Steamboat Springs” or “hotels close to Jackson Hole ski area” to get in front of travelers looking for specific ski destination lodging.

3. Leverage user-generated content and social ads

User-generated content (UGC) is gold. People trust reviews from real guests. Whether you’re a resort or a hotel, showcase testimonials through social ads that highlight real guest experiences.

Actionable item: Run social ads with hotel guest testimonials or reviews. Feature experiences like après-ski fun or cozy lodge stays to build trust and encourage bookings.

4. Optimize for last-minute skiers

Skiers are spontaneous, so your hotel’s mobile-friendly site should be ready to capture those last-minute bookings. Ensure your hotel’s website is fast, easy to navigate, and optimized for mobile visitors planning a trip on a whim.

Actionable item: Offer last-minute hotel deals or special packages for travelers looking for spontaneous ski getaways. Push real-time notifications about snow conditions or exclusive offers to keep them engaged.

5. Personalize your hotel’s emails based on weather

Snow levels vary dramatically from region to region. Personalize your hotel’s email campaigns to reflect local weather conditions so your messages are always relevant.

Actionable item: Send tailored emails based on weather patterns. For example, promote “Fresh Powder Deals” during snowstorms and highlight non-ski activities like spa days or winter hikes on warmer days.

6. Work with flexible influencers

Influencers are great for spreading the word, but with unpredictable weather, you need partners who can promote both epic snow days and other experiences like après-ski or indoor activities around your hotel.

Actionable item: Collaborate with winter sports influencers who can showcase a variety of activities, from skiing to snowshoeing to relaxing at your resort or hotel.

7. Real-time promotions based on snow conditions

Real-time hotel marketing is key. If a big snowstorm hits, you’ll want to be ready with promotions that can go live instantly. Keep your property top-of-mind by capitalizing on current snow conditions.

Actionable Item: Set up automated campaigns that trigger based on weather. Promote last-minute deals during a snowstorm or highlight non-ski activities when conditions are mild.

Final thoughts: Stay agile and make the most of this year’s ski season

The 2024-25 ski season may be unpredictable, but your hotel’s marketing doesn’t have to be. With these strategies, your resort or hotel can stay at the top of your mind, no matter the weather. Whether your guests are skiing or relaxing nearby, stay flexible, creative, and ready to make this season your best yet.

For expert guidance and tailored ski messaging strategies, contact Gcommerce Solutions today.

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