In the era of the internet, it’s easy for the most amazing resort experiences to get lost in the endless stream of advertising and digital content. With so many resort options, resort marketers who truly want to break through the noise have a variety of tools in their arsenal to help them make the most of their advertising dollars by helping them recruit the customers — often times customers who become repeat visitors, coming back again and again, year after year.
Here are seven resort advertising tips – courtesy of your friends at BIGEYE – to help your bookings skyrocket.
1. Invest in search engine optimization
In a highly competitive space like the resort industry, it is important to ensure people can actually find your business in the midst of all the other websites out there. In this industry in particular, tailoring your website’s content to make sure your site appears in organic search is a great way to attract attention to your site.
2. Experiment with Google AdWords and Facebook advertising
AdWords is a great way to give your business an extra boost in terms of search. Marketers can set their own rates and can also bid on keywords. By using such a service, marketers can experiment with images, call to actions and landing pages when testing on Google AdWords. This type of advertising can sometimes takes a little experimentation to get it just right, but, if it makes sense for your business to try it, AdWords users often experience excellent results.
Similarly, Facebook Ads allows users to select keywords and set rates for their campaigns. Facebook also offers hyper-targeted approaches, offering ads targeted directly at users based on their interests (i.e., travel, leisure) and location.
3. Optimize your webpage
If you’re still working with the website someone designed for you in 1996, chances are your page isn’t optimized for the web. In terms of optimization, there are numerous approaches. One is to design the site for SEO purposes, so that it appears highly-ranked in organic web searches, but sometimes this isn’t the most visually-pleasing approach, and may result in high bounce rates. Therefore, experimenting and testing items such as the placement of a call to action, the page aesthetic, and placement of keywords and phrases can help you nail down what works best for your site visitors.
Also, be sure to optimize your site for mobile and tablet experiences using responsive design. In doing so, you can create an easy-to-use site that looks good no matter what platform.
4. Collect email addresses, front and center on your homepage
Email marketing is here to stay, mainly because people who use it see results. They’ve found they’re able to reach their users directly in their inboxes, which is a great way to keep users up to date about deals and happenings at the resort. Implementing an easy email collection box is a great way to increase the number of people who see your email blasts.
5. Optimize your emails
Optimizing your email experience will improve the number of people who click through the email to the site. Even factors such as the subject line and the time of day they receive the email can have a major effect on whether people take the time to look at them. Then, once they do open the email, what do they see? If the content isn’t optimized for mobile and tablet devices, users could decide not to view the email if it takes too long to load or looks garbled.
6. Invest in customer service
In the digital age, customer service and marketing are inextricably linked. A happy customer is the best marketing tool your resort can have, as that customer is likely to share their experience with their friends or on social information sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Make it easy for the user to provide feedback and to talk to a real person when they have questions or suggestions for improvement.
7. Try ad retargeting
Once a person does visit your page, they may be interested initially but could get distracted from the ultimate goal of purchase as they move on to other items. A relatively new technology called retargeting uses the viewer’s browsing habits to store information, allowing brands to position their ads in front of the user at a later date on a completely different website. The idea is that the person may be inspired at that later time to purchase the good or service they’d only thought about before. Resorts can capitalize on this, as it often takes people some time to decide they want to book a vacation, and retargeting can help put the experience right in front of them, over and over again.
Taken together, these resort marketing factors can ensure more visitors come to your site and spend more time there, which will inevitably result in more bookings. The team at our Orlando marketing agency thinks that resort marketers that are already taking these steps to improve the booking experience are at a distinct advantage, as is reflected in higher booking numbers.
Contact us today and we can help you implement a number of these helpful tips for your resort!
