Boutique Hotel Marketing 101

Return on Investment might be one of the most critical metrics for measuring the success of any business. Everything revolves around maximizing ROI in your marketing. Fortunately, there is no one way to accomplish that — most of your strategies will depend on what your strengths are.

For boutique hotels, the trick is to be noticed in an extremely competitive environment populated by much more prominent brands. Even though you may feel disadvantaged from the start of that race, it’s still possible to make a difference by using earned and paid media.

They might be best defined as organic marketing versus purchased content. Organic marketing includes reviews, social media and blog posts. On the other hand, purchased content or paid media is mainly ads and sponsored content.

Using Paid Media for Boutique Hotel Marketing: The main obstacle in paid media is the budget. For Pay Per Click ads, hotels might expect a click to cost them an average of $1.44. Unfortunately, not all of those clicks will convert into paying customers.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for a boutique hotel to use PPC ads and have great ROI, but the strategy should be smart. For example, focusing on local keywords might cost you less and work better than trying for extremely competitive, expensive keywords.

If you keep in mind what people tend to search for when they need a hotel, you can use some unique properties of your hotel as keywords. Think of descriptors like “pet-friendly” and you’ll be on the right track.

Using Earned Media to Maximize ROI: The upside of focusing on earned media is that doesn’t cost too much to get started with. However, it can take some time to see the uptick in ROI metrics. One review won’t do a lot, but a hundred of them will make a difference.

One of the significant advantages of earned media is that user-generated content helps build trust in your brand. It is why you need as many reviews, blogs and social media posts as possible. Fortunately, there are inexpensive yet effective ways of getting them:

Remind and encourage customers to post reviews — by inviting your customers to leave a review on TripAdvisor, Facebook etc. through your social media and email newsletter, you can garner enough reviews to make your hotel visible;
Reach out to bloggers and travel influencers — in order to create buzz, it’s essential to work with industry influencers who can promote you to their audience.

USING EITHER COMES WITH ITS OWN SET OF PROS AND CONS. LET’S HAVE A CLOSER LOOK AT HOW BOUTIQUE HOTELS CAN USE THEM TO BUILD A STRONG MARKETING STRATEGY:

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