Having a strong online presence is essential for any business, including hotels. As a hotel owner, you need to showcase your property, manage bookings, and provide a seamless user experience for potential guests. This is where Webflow puts you in the driver's seat, with user friendly navigation and website development tools.
Intuitive website design and customization
Webflow offers a user-friendly interface that allows hotel owners to create stunning, custom-designed websites without the need for coding knowledge. With its drag-and-drop functionality, you can easily arrange and design elements on your website, such as images, text, booking forms, and testimonials. This level of customization enables you to create a visually appealing website that aligns with your hotel's branding and style.
Natively mobile-first design
In today's mobile-driven world, having a website that adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes is crucial. Webflow provides responsive design options, ensuring that your hotel website looks and functions flawlessly on various devices, including smartphones and tablets. By delivering a consistent user experience across all platforms, you increase the chances of attracting potential guests and driving direct bookings.
Powerful search engine optimization capabilities
A well-optimized website is more likely to appear in search engine results, increasing your hotel's visibility and organic traffic. Webflow offers built-in SEO features that allow you to optimize your website's meta tags, headings, URLs, and alt tags for images. Additionally, you can create SEO-friendly sitemaps, add canonical tags, and enable SSL encryption for a secure browsing experience. By leveraging these SEO capabilities, you can improve your hotel's online visibility and attract more guests through organic search.
Easy to use content management system (CMS)
Webflow's integrated content management system allows hotel owners to effortlessly update and manage website content. You can easily add new pages, update room descriptions, showcase special offers, or publish blog posts to engage with your audience. The intuitive CMS interface provides a streamlined workflow, enabling you to keep your website up-to-date with the latest information about your hotel, amenities, and promotions.
Webflow provides hotel owners with a comprehensive platform to create stunning, user-friendly websites and take control of their online presence. With its intuitive design tools, mobile-responsive capabilities, booking management integration, SEO features, content management system, and analytics tracking, Webflow empowers hotel owners to attract more guests, streamline operations, and drive direct bookings. By harnessing the power of Webflow, you can elevate your hotel's online presence, improve guest experiences, and ultimately increase revenue in today's competitive hospitality industry.
When it comes to luxury hospitality, every empty room represents a missed opportunity and mastering the art of revenue management is paramount. But revenue management doesn't exist in isolation; it thrives when sales and marketing work with it in concert, and one of the primary channels that transcend both marketing and revenue management is metasearch.
Metasearch engines have revolutionized the way travelers search, compare, and book accommodations. From the perspective of our digital marketing agency, which specializes in boosting direct bookings for luxury hotels and resorts, understanding the symbiotic relationship between revenue management and metasearch is the key to unlocking success in today's competitive landscape.
The role of revenue management in luxury hospitality
At the core of revenue management lies the art of optimizing room rates and availability to maximize revenue. For luxury hotels and resorts, this becomes even more intricate due to the higher price points and the desire to maintain exclusivity. Here's how revenue management benefits luxury properties:
Dynamic pricing: Revenue management systems allow luxury hotels to adjust room rates in real-time based on factors like demand, seasonality, and special events. This ensures that rooms are priced competitively while maximizing profits.
Inventory control: By carefully managing room availability, revenue managers can create a sense of scarcity, driving up demand for luxury accommodations. This scarcity can also be leveraged to promote direct bookings and loyal customer relationships.
Data-driven decision-making: Revenue management relies heavily on data analytics. It helps luxury hotels make informed decisions regarding pricing and promotions, ensuring that every room is optimally monetized.
The rise of metasearch engines
Metasearch engines have transformed the way travelers plan their trips. Platforms like Google Hotel Ads, TripAdvisor, and Trivago allow users to compare prices, read reviews, and make reservations directly through the platform. For luxury hotels, metasearch offers several advantages:
Increased visibility: Luxury properties can showcase their offerings to a global audience. This visibility is crucial for attracting high-end travelers seeking unique experiences.
Direct booking potential: Metasearch engines often facilitate direct bookings, which is a priority for luxury hotels aiming to reduce reliance on online travel agencies (OTAs) and retain higher margins.
Data Insights: Metasearch platforms provide valuable data on user behavior, helping luxury hotels refine their marketing strategies and better understand their target audience.
The symbiotic relationship
The symbiotic relationship between revenue management and metasearch is where the magic happens. Here's how they complement each other:
Real-time data sharing: Metasearch engines provide revenue managers with real-time data on market trends, competitor pricing, and user preferences. This information is invaluable for making pricing decisions.
Optimized presence: Revenue management ensures that luxury hotels are competitively priced, while Metasearch engines ensure that these competitive rates are prominently displayed to potential guests.
Direct booking incentives: Revenue managers can create special offers and promotions that are exclusive to direct bookings, enticing travelers to book directly through the hotel's website.
Targeted marketing: With the insights from metasearch data, luxury hotels can tailor their marketing efforts to specific demographics, improving the efficiency of their ad spend.
Success stories in luxury hospitality
Many luxury hotels and resorts have successfully harnessed this symbiotic relationship. By integrating revenue management strategies with metasearch optimization, they've seen increased direct bookings, improved profitability, and enhanced guest experiences.
In conclusion, for luxury hotels and resorts, the marriage between revenue management and Metasearch is a symbiotic relationship that drives growth and profitability. By leveraging real-time data, optimizing pricing, and strategically promoting direct bookings, luxury properties can thrive in today's competitive landscape.
As a digital marketing agency, we understand the power of this synergy and are committed to helping luxury hotels and resorts unlock their full potential in the digital age. Contact us to explore how we can tailor a custom solution for your property and maximize your revenue through this symbiotic relationship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) covers a variety of topics and tactics related to the fair treatment of all people. In the workplace, this means creating a space where all employees feel safe and welcome.
More and more businesses are starting to implement DEI programs, but there’s no real standard, given the broadness of the topic. Some programs are designed to support underrepresented social groups, some to compile employee resources, and others to signify a progressive company culture. Because of this variation, it can be hard to decide which strategies will work best for your business.
Learn our tips and strategy for promoting DEI in the workplace, in our full E-Book, here.
