#hospitalitycode, #harundagli, #SEO, #SEOToolkit, #SEOGuide, #MarketingTools, #Content, #website, #reputation, #SEOToolbox
I have previously covered Digital Marketing Strategy and Managing Reputation to highlight the importance and how to use it effectively. Some hotels do this by using third-party companies which I also highlighted the disadvantages of this approach previously. It requires ownership, attention to detail, getting constant guest feedback and using all the tools available create unique experiences and a true reflection of your property.
There are a lot of FREE marketing tools have exploded onto the scene, streamlining every single hotel marketing task you can think of. From creating eye-catching visuals to deep diving into your comp set’s methods of monitoring every single social media mention.
Before we review them, I would like to highlight the important content marketing tips;
Continuously Assess Your Top 20 Sales Opportunities
Be mindful and try to see the property with fresh eyes. Talk to your guests!
Use and embrace the key metrics your company or owners care about the most
Monitor Guest Sentiment daily basis to find key learning points and strengths your property has.
Know your audience and be honest about your property and unique identity
Consistently and creatively telling a meaningful, truthful story is what can truly attract travellers to you.
Work closely with your revenue teams
Study Your CompSet, identify what differentiates your property from others
Instead of competing with OTAs on price, target the consumer fears regarding the use of OTA
Harness the power of emotional messaging
To prove how your marketing efforts are adding to the hotel’s revenue, you’ll need to calculate your marketing cost per booking (MCPB) by segment and from the OTAs
It is up to you whether you want to supplement your current paid marketing programs or due to budget restrictions, you do not have enough money allocated to your marketing efforts. I have listed some of the best and free tools available online.
Hotel’s need to position themselves uniquely to get ahead of their CompSet and to do this, you need to create loads of meaningful content, blog posts and even staff picks. I have categories best Free Marketing Tools available online for easy use, these are;
CompSet Research and Review
Social Media
Analytics
Content Creation and Improvement Tools
1. COMPSET RESEARCH AND REVIEW
(Free; Facebook advertising is not required)
As of the second quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly active users. This makes Facebook one of the most robust collections of audience data around, including what people like, what they buy, where they live, who they’re friends with, Demographics, age, gender, education level, lifestyles, interests and hobbies etc.
Facebook Audience Insights gives you aggregated information about two groups of people – people connected to your Page and people on Facebook – so you can create content that resonates and easily find more people like the ones in your current audience.
This free tool will not only give you insight into your hotel’s audience but also your competition’s audience. Use this information to shape your messages and campaigns to target effectively.
(Free)
You can add up to three competing hotel’s URLs, and the system produces a detail report on how well each of given websites is performing based on several factors, including speed and search engine optimization, broken links, keywords and phrases analysis. While you can identify issues, you may have on your website, you can also see what they doing wrong. It will provide suggestions on what you need to do to increase search traffic and visibility.
(Search for free, with paid premium options available)
This useful tool lets you research and downloads your comp set’s most profitable keywords. You’ll see both paid keywords the competition has invested in, plus keywords they’re targeting for organic search results. Leverage these details to enhance your hotel’s own market share and outrank the others.
Moat
(Free, with paid premium options available)
This free tool uncovers all the digital ads that your comp set has created. Not only will you see the actual digital creative, but also the dimensions, where the ad appeared, and when the campaign ran. If a hotel brand has purchased an interactive banner and rich media, those ads will animate right on the screen. Use this tool to see what creative your comp set has out in the market and to get inspired by other brands.
2. SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
Social Mention
http://www.socialmention.com/
(Free)
Just type your hotel name and start monitoring social mentions. Specify which social platforms you want to search, and see details including top keywords, top users, top hashtags, sources and sentiment. You can also export this information easily for your analysis and month-end reporting.
Hootsuite
https://hootsuite.com/#
(Free for up to three social media accounts and 30 scheduled messages)
One of the most popular and generally used hotel social media management tool available online. Hootsuite is an all-in-one platform for creating, curating and scheduling content, run social media ads, measuring your hotel’s social ROI and monitoring multiple accounts and keywords. This is one of the preferred free tools of hotel social media managers responsible for overseeing accounts for the restaurant, spa, golf course or sister properties.
Clearbit Connect
(Free)
Perfect for group sales managers who want to gather social intelligence on prospects, Clearbit Connect connects to your Gmail or Outlook account and shows the LinkedIn details and activity of prospects in an email sidebar. Even better, it will provide the company’s details too. Including address, the number of employees, funding, and social accounts.
3. ANALYTICS
Cyfe
(Free for up to 5 marketing widgets)
Cyfe allows you to monitor and analyse up to 5 widgets showing social media accounts, SEO, email campaigns, blog, website and more from one dashboard. The large collection of available widgets includes MailChimp, Infusionsoft, Google AdSense, Instagram, YouTube, WordPress, Highrise, Google Analytics and Moz. This streamlined solution will bring all marketing performance data under the same roof, with the convenience of a single log-in.
Mixpanel
https://mixpanel.com/
(Free for up to 5 million data points per month and 3 team members)
Mixpanel will monitor your customers based on their actions and behaviours, not page views. Understand every user's journey; Acquire, engage, and retain with actionable user analytics. Your hotel can monitor how visitors interact within your entire site or you can even just focus on one page or button. Best part – they can do this without any techie programming, making it easy for the non-techie hotel marketers.
Convertable
https://convertable.com/
(Free)
This great inbound marketing intelligence tool will be one of your favourites in CRM marketing activities. Power your hotel’s email sign-up or RFP forms using Convertable, which analyses your web forms’ metadata to unveil crucial information on leads. Besides collecting the usual name and email address, Convertable will show the relevant keywords the visitor used to find your hotel, the visitor’s location, their operating system and device, which pages they visited (and how long they spent on that page), and how the visitor arrived at your hotel site (paid, organic, etc) in the first place.
This deep dive into the customer’s path will give you a better understanding of your audience and gauge the success of your marketing efforts.
4. CONTENT CREATION AND IMPROVEMENT TOOLS
Grammarly
https://app.grammarly.com/
(Free, with paid premium options available)
Grammarly is a powerful tool that checks grammar and spelling for anything you write online, including emails, social media posts or comments, blogs, and even the content you create on your hotel website. You can use it both for personal or business purposes on several browser extensions, MS Office Add-in and as a desktop application. Grammarly works alongside you, quickly and easily makes your writing better and makes you sound like a pro, or at least helps you avoid silly spelling mistakes you’re your content, letters and written communications.
Headline Analyser
(Headline Analyzer offered by CoSchedule Free of Charge, they also offer paid professional services)
Headline Analyzer scores your headline ideas and rates how effective they are. On average, 5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy. Therefore, if you don’t get it right, you have little chance to attract people to read your content. Use this to gauge how much your headlines and subjects will resonate with your guests. Consumers today have minuscule attention spans, thanks to ever-streaming content online. Not only does every second count, but so does every word. Whether it’s a monthly email you send to a targeted list or a blog post, the headline will ultimately determine the number of people who click.
Canva
(Free, with paid premium options available)
Consider Canva as a virtual digital graphic designer. It offers thousands of fresh and modern templates for just about any type of visual marketing assets, such as brochures, posters, Facebook covers, email heads, and even infographics and PPT presentations. Customize with various fonts, colours, and your hotel images.
Piktochart
(Free, with paid premium options available)
Piktochart offers free templates for eye-catching infographics that are meant to present facts and figures beautifully. No complex design software. No heavy designer fees. Just a simple, intuitive tool that helps you tell your story with the visual impact it deserves. Your sales team can create infographics to compare your offerings with the CompSet, whittle down the benefits of your meeting packages, or break down event costs.
Browseo
(Free)
Browseo clears out all the style and visual extras and allows you to see what the search engines see. You can see how relevant your hotel’s web pages are too specific search terms, based on external and internal links, META information and headings. While the eye-catching design will make your hotel website more attractive to visitors, the way potential guests see your website is different how search engines review it. This tool allows you to change and improve your pages so that it is easy to use, visible and eye-catching.
Keywordtool.io
(Free, with paid premium options available)
I am sure you would like more people to visit your website, read your content and buy your products or services. Keywords are the foundation of every marketing and SEO campaign. The easiest way to achieve it is to find out what your potential customers or readers are searching for on Google and create content on your website around these topics. You might use the Google Adwords by paying additional supplement, Keyword Tool is the best alternative to Google Keyword Planner and other Keyword Research Tools.
Link Explorer
(10 free queries a month)
Check your hotel’s web domain and page authority using this free link analysis tool. It will check how many links your hotel’s website is getting and from which source. Plus, you’ll also discover your most linked-to pages, top followed links to your site, top pages viewed in your site, Top anchor text and linking domains by DA. Even better is that this tool will also give you this same information on your comp set’s website. So, you can check and learn what they do best or worst!
Splitshire
https://www.splitshire.com/
(Free)
There are thousands of free photos to be more awesome out there. Grab them and be creative!
Unsplash
(Free)
There are thousands of free photos shared by the professional photographers. You can upload your own as well as download for your websites and any commercial use, no copyrights required!
Copywritely
https://copywritely.com/
(Free, with paid premium options available)
It’s straightforward. Just copy it and press Ctrl+V. Now, wait till the tool finishes its job. Google loves plagiarism-free content. Copywritely detects plagiarism with deep searching algorithms which scan for matching fragments on billions of websites. In just five seconds you will get an in-depth report of duplicate content and its sources.
After Google Panda algorithm appeared, marketers, SEO experts, and a wide variety of businesses realized how much keyword frequency and density really matter. With Copywritely, you can easily spot keyword spam and avoid getting banned by search engines.
Sitechecker
(Free)
Sitechecker is totally free, provides comprehensive SEO Audit on your website, get estimates for 156 parameters on one page, provides detailed how to fix guides with a step-by-step approach. HTTP status code, page size, URL friendliness, display in Google SERP, the correct filling of title, description and h1 tags are one of the most important factors, those should be checked when assessing the quality of internal optimization. You can check as much as websites you like.
Keyword Explorer
https://moz.com/explorer
(Free up to 10 queries, with paid premium options available)
Keyword research is the bedrock of SEO. People search for things online and you want your content to pop up in the results. Keyword research tools, like Keyword Explorer, help you figure out what keywords people are searching, what keywords you're already ranking for, the demand for certain searches, and the strength of other sites competing for your target keywords.
SeoSiteCheckup
https://seositecheckup.com/
(Free, with paid premium options available)
Audit and score for your website. SeoSiteCheckup runs through a fast audit of your site, checking for proper tags and surfacing any errors that might come up.
Find Broken Links
(Free)
Discover errors on your site. The link report from Ninja Internet Marketers combs through your whole site and highlights a number of link insights, including the internal and external links that need fixing.
Putsmail
(Free)
After spending hours collecting details and writing copy for your hotel’s next monthly newsletter or email marketing campaign, use PutsMail to see a functional, immediate preview of the email itself. This means you can skip sending countless test emails to yourself to scout out any edits. Just enter the email’s HTML and subject line and see a fully functional preview.
Please follow me on www.hospitalitycode.com for my articles on various areas of Hospitality business, trends and interpretation methods.
Comments