2011 Online Marketing Predictions for Hotels, Resorts and Property Managers

Nearly 4 weeks into January, it is time to make some recommendations and predictions for the next year.  This is especially for lodging properties and their managers.

Carrie Hill, Blizzard Internet’s Director of Search Strategies, has already made some great recommendations for 2011 marketing strategies, but wanted to put my two cents in.

Below are four 2011 strategies I think are important and five additional predictions from other marketing expert blogs.

#1 AdWords Evolve

Advertising in Google is quickly becoming much more than the classic PPC “sponsored ad.”
Already we see:

• Remarketing
• Display Ad Builder
• Google Places Tags
• Sitelink Advertising
• Video Ads
• Click-to-Call
• Mobile Ads
• Google Boost

On the list above, Remarketing, Google Places Tags and Mobile Ads hold the most opportunity for the average hotel or resort.

Strategies for 2011 will include expanding PPC campaigns into all these new segments and opportunities.  Expect to dip your toes into some of the new advertising opportunities that are challenging AdWords for your resort’s advertising dollars:  Facebook and LinkedIn.  Twitter may be next.

Google Local will also be a larger part of your budget as Google Places probably rolls out new advertising options.  The upcoming Google Offers may also be enticing.

#2 Your Campaigns Grow and the JOB Gets Bigger.

2011 could be a challenging year for many hotels, resorts and vacation rentals because of the growing number of segments and the resources (both dollar and human) they require.  Managing your online presence is becoming a bigger job.  Your four biggest investments will continue to be website design, SEO, email marketing and PPC.

Your budget will bulge though, as Google’s SEO algorithms become more sophisticated and based on more indicators.  If you want to compete for top search rankings, our hotel or resort will  pay attention and improve in areas like:

• Traditional SEO and linkbuilding
• Video (a growing element)
• Mobile (a growing element)
• Social Media (a growing element, and yes, Google will be ranking you more highly based upon your social footprint.  Social will start to embed itself into search.)
• News and Press Releases
• Local (Google Places and about 100 other websites)
• Usability (Yes, we think Google will start ranking you based on how good your site is for your guest)

Lots of other areas are also crying out for management and optimization:

• Make sure to keep your listing up-to-date and optimized at Google Places, Bing Local, Yahoo Local and Yahoo Travel.
• Keep paying attention to your online reviews, manage them, and ask for more.  TripAdvisor, Yelp, Judy’s Book, Google Places, etc.
• Coupon and Local Check-in Sites (Travelzoo, Groupon, LivingSocial, Facebook Places, Facebook Deals, foursquare) will require additional management time.
• Last year, Adwords was the main game in town.  As mentioned above, the options in Adwords are growing (as will your dollar and human budget).  Next year, you will be looking to advertise in places like Facebook, Bing, Google Places and maybe LinkedIn or even Twitter.

The point here is that there are a growing number of campaigns to prioritize, manage, measure and optimize. Which will you do?

#3 Making your website more appealing and usable will become necessary.

There are new tools making this easier and more effective.  Your competitors are starting to do it and your guests will naturally gravitate toward the best and most effective websites.  Expect to grow your A/B testing budget and your website update budget. Plan on spending more time increasing your conversion rates because you will realize it is more cost effective to convert more of your current visitors than try to get more visitors.  You will also probably spend more time examining and interpreting your Google Analytics results to find opportunities.

#4 Customer Relationship Management

I prefer to call this “nurturing a client through the buying life cycle with attention given to their favorite means of contact. “   This has been taken up more by B2B companies than the more retail lodging industry.  However, we think that the lodging industry will become more attuned to creating long term relationships with potential guests.  There are two ideas here:

• You will focus on maintaining a long-term relationship with potential guests. You will pay less attention to “likes” and “hits” and “visitors” and more attention to having a relationship and being in front of the guest when they are ready to book their stay.  Your guests will not be complete strangers but rather part of a managed relationship.  You will begin to develop a creepy level of information about your prospects.
• You will use the communication channel that is preferred by the guest. Email, Facebook, Chat, Mobile, Reviews and Twitter are all possible digital communication channels that matter to different segments of your guests.   You will begin to try to connect these to each other find out more about your prospects.

The holy grail of this opportunity will be software that manages it all together.  That may be a few years away for hotels, resorts and property managers.  I would guess it will be based in Salesforce first.  Regardless, watch for this to start happening.

Here are some of my favorite predictions from others:

#1 Someone Proves (or a Search Engine Confirms) that Clicks/Visits Influence Rankings
Rand Fiskin says:

I’m taking a chance on this one, but I’ve been hearing from more and more SEOs that there’s some correlation between earning clicks and moving up in the rankings. In 2011, we’ll get confirmation, either through testing or an admission from an engine that click-through-rate from the SERPs, visit count outside of search (or diversity of sources), or other usage-based data is in the ranking algorithm (or a method they use to help ID spam).

#2 Local Search Will Grow
Bruce Clay says:

For SEO, local search results are currently seen on 20 percent of all search result pages and I predict that local results will grow to 50 percent by year end before settling between 70 percent and 80 percent by the end of 2012. The leading SEO firms will figure out much of the local algorithm, develop advanced tools to assist with and measure local success, and this will emerge as the most talked about SEO service for 2012. What is unique about this evolution is that there will emerge a massive registry of validated business information – the first planetary business directory and a preamble to both local and international trade for the next decade. A certified directory will be key to success at both local and international levels, especially if it is integrated as an influence in the search engine results. Local grows as a key SEO focus as it consumes more and more of the search results landscape.

Nelson Scovill says:

Finding your barber, grocer, and contractor online will be just one query away. This trend is already growing with the business card of your company mapped to your location. Will this pick up for the masses? “This changes the rule so that now the site that has the most attractive/relevant preview will generate the higher number of clicks, so adding in location-based keyword analysis is going to become even more important,” said Marina Greenwood of ActivaPR

#3 Bing Steps into the Ring
Joe from Blog Herald says:

It was recently revealed that Bing now has an effective 30% share of the search market, this is a big gain on previous figure, a mere 11%. It is difficult to know whether this is down to Google losing support, or Bing doing well, or even both. What is clear is the fact that Google no longer enjoys the dominance of the search arena that it once did. Whatever the reason, SEO Engineers will need begin optimizing for both search engines if they wish to get a full spread of results for their clients.

#4 Social Will Become More Integrated Into Search
Nelson Scovill says:

As the Web is humming with Facebook and Twitter comments, what are people saying about your company and products? We’ve already seen social results show in the search engine results pages, but many predict larger algorithmic changes around social. Matt Lawson of SearchEngineLand said, “This new, more social search algorithm will allow users to rate search results or even websites, and have user ‘likes’ factored into ranking algorithms.”

#5 WordPress – SEO King of a Hill!
freetrafficsystem.com says:

WordPress is definitely ahead of other popular blog platforms that is so closely associated with SEO. The demand for WordPress SEO is even higher than for blog SEO in general! This fact is a good proof how widely spread WP blog platform is these days. And these big numbers are huge market. Market of WordPress SEO is expanding, the charts above prove that.