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Success or failure for hospitality brands often boils down to a single factor: Can customers find, learn about, and confidently choose your business based on the information they find about it online? It’s a customer journey that plays out for millions of hospitality brands every day, whether they choose to engage with it or not. While organic word-of-mouth is important for any business, referral marketing at scale can be elusive. Hospitality brands looking to take the next steps need to take a more aggressive approach toward influencing customer behavior: optimizing the path-to-purchase to maximize confidence at each touchpoint in the journey.
This is the first post in a three-part series showing how hospitality brands can optimize their digital footprint for growth. It focuses on “Discovery”, and includes action that can be taken to improve the frequency and timing with which your brand is served to potential customers via on and off-site strategies – digital and otherwise. In it, we’re working under the assumption that you have at least a one-page website to act as the root of your online ecosystem – a place where customers can go to learn more about and convert with your brand. It’s likely not the acme of an integrated brand experience quite yet, but we’re going to provide some platform agnostic strategies to help you get there.
Our goal isn’t to cover the entire digital marketing ecosystem in all of its technical detail, only to help hospitality leaders, who may not have a breadth of experience there, find the 20/80. That is, the 20% of work that will get most brands 80% percent of the way towards making digital a working component in their business strategy. In it, we cover a few of the easiest to implement online discovery strategies – ones that, because they are frequently missed or ignored by competitors in the hospitality space, allow brands who are willing to put in a little work to move the needle without much expense.
Discovery, the First Step in the Online Journey
“Discovery” is the short period of time after a buyer has decided that they need a product or service, but not yet how to fulfill it. Google calls it the “zero moment of truth” and, in highly competitive environments like hospitality, it’s one of the most important factors that brands looking to grow their digital footprint need to understand. With over a trillion businesses now online, the real question isn’t how to participate though, it’s how to get recognized by both machines and humans as the best solution for any given customer’s need.
Doing it starts with great products and services (Unfortunately we can’t help with this one) and a deep understanding of the native and third-party platforms that help shape your reputation around them. It goes well beyond just standing up a website though; it includes optimizing the on and off-page elements that define your digital footprint by ensuring that your site is visible, shaping your online reputation, and positioning yourself to be found by the right customers at the right time in their buyer journey to drive growth. Get started below:
Top On Page Discovery Factors for Hospitality Brands
On-page discovery strategies include actions that can be taken via your content management system (CMS) – WordPress, Drupal, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, etc – to improve discovery across the web.
Title & Heading Tags
“Title Tags” and their on-page equivalent, “Heading Tags”, are small pieces of code that, when appended strategically to text on your website, help search engines understand its identity and purpose. They point to the most important information on your page and can be compared to meeting someone at a party and introducing yourself by saying
“Hi, my name is {Heading Tag 1} and I perform {Heading Tag 2} services.
Heading tags 3-6 are generally used to support additional product data and are not as important, but still help search engines understand the depth of your offering.
There are a variety of strategies to implement title and heading tags, but the most common missed opportunity we see isn’t technical, it’s strategic. It includes brands that define themselves – title and heading tags – solely by their name or not at all. It may be a good strategy to help people who already know who you are find you, but it means you’re likely not getting found by the customers that matter most. Search engines are also pretty good about finding you on their own.
This is, of course, more complex, but ensuring that your title and heading tags reference the products you sell vs/as well as your brand is easy to implement and a great starting point.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.– BILLI REUSS
Products & Services
Using restaurants as an example, menus, events, and locations are opportunities to provide additional rich detail about what you offer, supporting the “thesis of your site”. For example, say you sell sushi. Add menu items to your website that bolster your claimed subject matter authority. What kinds of sushi do you have? What style is it? What are your catering options?
Many hospitality organizations default to PDF flyers and other information collateral (like menus) here. Be aware that while PDFs are machine readable, they don’t provide a great web experience and are deprecated in search. Machine readable formats like HTML, AJAX or Python (Of which almost every website is one) are vastly preferable.
Location Content
As a local business, optimizing your site to be found by people in or visiting your geography is strategically vital. Results for spas in Tulsa for example, aren’t generally relevant to customers in LA. Lucky for you, Google has placed a lot of emphasis on understanding a website’s location over the last decade. All you have to do is optimize for it.
But how do search engines know which results to return?
- Make sure your location is built into the page via HTML
- Add geolocation tags to your images
- Link to your brand’s location in Google Maps
- Use heading tags to call out your service area
Local search is important whether you’re a single-or multi-unit brand, but the strategy for each may differ slightly. For example, multi-unit brands should create unique landing pages for each of your locations. Its content should distinguish it from your other locations with a unique address, other nearby destinations, or local awards and partnerships, et al.
Fresh Content
Few hospitality brands take advantage of something called long-tail search, making it very low hanging fruit for finding customers that are ready to buy. For example, while your page may rank for “sushi restaurants near me”, does it rank for “highest ranked sushi restaurant in {insert your region}?
If not, it’s probably not hard to do so. Post content, like blogs, are the most familiar way to do this, but audio and video are both on the rise. Content doesn’t need to be long, just authoritative. Start by answering the questions you hear every day via your website’s post. An hour or two of work here every week could help you net thousands of new customers over a year.
Fresh content has the added bonus of building your website’s credibility around specific search terms, draws backlinks, and helps potential customers understand your expertise as well – no small achievement.
Open Graph
Open graph refers to the images and preview text that people see when your URL is shared via social media, email, etc. This isn’t a “make or break” type of change, but is important to standing out in an era of shared media. It also helps drive reputability and inclusion on various local awards as third-party sites rarely want to link to websites that makes the design on their own site look or feel unfinished.
There are a number of ways to implement Open Graph that will change depending on your platform. But every platform has either a native or plugin based tool for doing so that makes it very uncomplicated.
Off Page Local Discovery Factors
Off-page discovery strategies include actions that can be taken via third-party referrers including other websites, platforms, and tools that lend credence to your brand’s expertise and reputation.
Back Links
The internet is a popularity contest measured by the type and volume of websites pointing back at you for the subject matter you want to be found on. Of course this is a truncated definition for easier understanding. What you need to know for right now however, is that the more entities that point back at you and the more trustworthy those entities are, the more likely search engines are to serve your business when potential customers reach out to help them find a business like yours.
Fortunately for you, aggressive backlinking outreach isn’t common in the hospitality space outside of major enterprise brands and it’s not hard to invest a little bit of time to expand your backlink profile. Backlinks can be acquired from a wide range of sources: Business listings, mass media, reviews, et al. Some will come naturally, just by setting up shop. Others can be engineered via the
Citations
Citations are a special kind of back link specifically referencing NAP (Name, address, place) data. While not carrying the amount of individual weight as a traditional backlink, citations can be a powerful indicator of your service area, reputability, and your business status and information. There are literally thousands of sites giving citations. Submitting, maintaining and updating them can be a big job though. If you’re looking for a quick solution to gain local citations, services like Yext, Moz Local, and Bright Local, all offer services or partnerships where they reach out to citations websites, list and manage your citations on an ongoing basis.
Awards
Awards – a la “Top Ten Sushi Restaurants in {Insert Cities} are a powerful way to gain citations as well as referrals. A little known secret about these “awards” is that they’re usually just based on the top {#} brands that show up on a specific search. These websites work to take advantage of the fact that customers are looking for easy ways to rank multiple options quickly. Do well with search, do well with reviews, and you’ll do well with awards, and so on.
Advertising
We won’t delve too far into advertising as it can be easy to burn a lot of cash quickly without the right expertise. Here are some quick tips to leveraging it correctly:
- Hospitality is one of the few places where we advocate strong display over search advertising for discovery. The ability to include rich media, social proof, and geography before the click (particularly on video pre-roll), can be 10x more effective.
- If you must advertise and feel like you have the cash to do it, remember that hospitality is an advocacy-driven business. That means that it can be more effective to amplify what other people say about you, than what you say about yourself.
- We know they can be pushy, but consider augmenting your reputation management program with advertising on hospitality based travel sites that already have trust.
Advertising
We all love to hate Yelp (and others like it), but “review aggregators” provide a service that Google has yet to quite master – comparing a number of options in a user interface that allows visitors to quickly compare and contrast services, service area, reviews et al. These sites always have large internal SEO teams and frequently rank above local brands because they only require a single click, instead of the multiple clicks it would take to accomplish the same task on search.
Leverage these platforms as part of your overall marketing strategy, proactively prompting reviews and delivering feedback in real time. They can have an enormous impact on the reservations you get from that platform as well as traffic back to your website.
Influencer
Is Kim Kardashian going to stump for your hospitality business? Probably not. That said, you’re probably better off with a more localized micro-influencer who’s built a strong local following and is working to begin monetizing their reach anyway. We don’t want to minimize the work a comprehensive influencer marketing campaign can take – from building your outreach list to negotiating prices, to following up on reporting. But reaching out to a single influencer here or there, is something that a growing operator or marketing manager can easily handle in small increments.
Find your influencer
Reach out to them via social media with a proposal
Negotiate the type of content and price
Keep track of business in response
While many people get intimidated by the process behind influencer marketing, on the micro level we’re talking about, it’s often just about finding people on social media that cover things to do with your geography and reaching out to them.
Public Relations
Similarly, public relations starts with a press release. Being able to write copy in a clear, concise, well formatted press release is important here, but you need not be Earnest Hemmingway. While services like Cision or Business Wire distribute press releases regionally or globally, they can be very expensive and you may not need that kind of reach. Simply perform a manual search for various media outlets’ contact information, and send your release to the right person. Following up with a call or email to pitch your story can also be very helpful.
Infinitely more important to gaining press coverage is having subject matter or an angle that subject matter that writers find newsworthy. Whether you’re creating the world’s biggest cupcake or the first five star hotel for cats, it’s important to remember that media figures must find your story remarkable – in the most literal sense of the word. There are plenty of opportunities to leverage your skill set to manufacture a story as well.
Strategic Parntershisp
Hospitality brands ten do travel in packs. Hotels recommend tourist attractions, who recommend restaurants, and so on. Media partnerships can be a useful and important way to gain online traction with them. These efforts may include being listed on each other’s website, offering special referral programs, and joining forces for local promotions.
In Part Two of this series, we’ll cover how brands can drive online engagement that allows them to stand out from the crowd and drive customer loyalty. If you’re looking for a professional with decades of experience optimizing hospitality business for discovery, we’d love to chat!