The Big Boys vs Own Marketing
One of the largest booking systems recently wrote a very interesting article about how it was much better to pay the large commision fees that are charged by the large booking giants such as Expedia, Booking.com and Laterooms etc than to try and do your own marketing – they argued that the cost would be far greater if you were to pay for SEO to get you on the 1st pages of search engines, or to pay per click for paid for advertising, or even worse, to pay for printed adverts which only have a very short exposure time. It is totally true that if you wanted to come up for highly competitive searches eg “holidays in Cornwall” you would need to pay thousands of pounds each month, over a very long period of time to even hope to get a first page ranking for this phrase, and that is because the big giants who do pay this amount, are already on the first page, so you can see you would have a very big job to remove them.
However, what many people do when finding accommodation using a large booking website such as Booking.com etc is to then do a web search on the accommodation they have taken a fancy to – so will end up on your website as they will be searching directly for your named accommodation, which of course you would hope your website would be on the 1st page of search engines for this! So having a nice looking, easy to navigate website is paramount, as they are then likely to book via your own site – but they will only do this if they are satisfied that your accommodation fits their requirements. If your website looks wonderful, the more likely someone is to book on your website, as a clean, professional website inspires trust.
Plenty of people visit your website, and then go away again. How much better would it be for you if you could “capture” the contact information of these visitors, and then have the ability to email these visitors from time to time; perhaps to entice them to book with a special offer? These visitors, if allowed to simply leave your website, are lost opportunities; as chances are they have landed on your website for exactly the reason we detailed above; they have read about you on another site, but want to know more about you before they book. If they are not ready to quite book, they will leave your site and perhaps not get round to getting back to you.
The ideal solution is to ask your site visitors to sign up to a newsletter; so that you can send them special offers and let them know about late availability – this will ensure that these visitors convert into bookings much after they initially visited your website!
In order to facilitate this, we can help our website customers achieve this goal, enabling them to not lose out on all these valuable site visitors; click here to read more about this service.
