Protect your hotel's brand
news
September 10, 2024
In the hotel industry, protecting the brand of your establishment is essential to ensure its profitability and long-term growth. In a digital environment where OTAs dominate distribution and competition for users' attention is fierce, investing in digital marketing strategies, specifically in PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns with branded keywords, has become a crucial tool for hoteliers. Below, we explain why investing in branded keywords is not only advisable, but essential to protect and enhance your business.
1. Protect your brand from the competition
One of the main reasons to invest in branded keywords is to protect your hotel from competition. OTAs and other competitors often bid on hotel brand names to capture traffic and bookings that would otherwise come directly to your website. By investing in PPC with your own branded keywords, you ensure that your ad appears above your competitors' ads, driving more traffic to your website and maintaining control over your leads. This not only protects your brand, but also ensures that customers find the most relevant and direct information about your hotel.
2. Reduces dependence on OTAs
OTA's can be an important source of bookings, but at a high cost in commissions, which in some cases can be as high as 30%. By driving qualified traffic directly to your website through PPC campaigns, you reduce the need to rely on these platforms and consequently lower your cost per customer acquisition. This not only improves your profit margins, but also strengthens your brand by fostering a direct relationship with your guests.
3. Control the message and the customer experience
Another advantage of investing in branded keywords is the total control over the message presented to users. Unlike OTA ads, where the message is focused on their own interests, in your PPC campaigns you can highlight exclusive promotions, benefits for booking directly or any other relevant information that reinforces the unique values of your hotel. This allows for more effective communication aligned with your brand strategy, which can significantly improve the customer experience from the first point of contact.
4. Improve visibility and conversion rate
Even if your website appears in the first organic positions of Google, PPC ads usually occupy the most prominent spaces on the results page. By not investing in branded keywords, you run the risk of users seeing your competitors' ads or OTAs first before they reach your website. In addition, branded searches tend to have a high purchase intent, which means that users who search directly for your hotel are closer to making a booking. By ensuring that these users reach your website through a PPC ad, you can significantly increase your conversion rate and capture more direct bookings.
5. Minimizes navigation errors and captures lost traffic.
Investing in branded keywords also allows you to minimize the risk of navigation errors. For example, if a customer mistypes your hotel's name in the search engine, without an active PPC campaign, they could be directed to an OTA or competitor. With PPC, you can capture even typo searches, ensuring that users arrive at your official page, where they have a higher probability of making a direct booking.
6. Complement your SEO strategy
PPC and SEO are not mutually exclusive strategies; in fact, they complement each other perfectly. While SEO is essential to maintain a strong organic presence, PPC allows you to have additional and more immediate visibility at the top of the search results page. This combination reinforces your brand awareness, increasing user trust and the likelihood that they will click through to your website, which ultimately improves your overall results.
7. Obtain valuable data to optimize your strategy
PPC campaigns provide a wealth of data on user behavior, such as the most effective keywords, conversion rates and ad performance. This data is invaluable for optimizing both your PPC and SEO strategy. By investing in branded keywords, you not only protect your business, but also gain critical information that will help you make more informed decisions and continually improve your marketing strategy.
8. Agility to communicate promotions and offers
Finally, PPC campaigns allow you to quickly communicate any promotion or campaign you want to launch. Unlike OTAs, where your promotions can get lost among thousands of options, in your PPC ads you can highlight exclusive offers and direct users directly to the booking page, ensuring a higher conversion rate.
ADDITIONAL WAYS TO FURTHER PROTECT YOUR HOTEL BRAND
In addition to PPC campaigns, you can also protect your brand from OTAs. If you have detected that many of your users come from a particular metasearch engine, you can protect your brand on that metasearch engine. Investing for example in Tripadvisor Business Advantage allows you to have first positions in searches for your hotel, as well as being able to insert the url of your hotel's website in the Tripadvisor page. Otherwise, a third party could invest for you and insert the URL of a website similar to yours and market your hotel as if it were the official website.
In conclusion, investing in branded keywords in PPC is an essential strategy to protect your hotel from competition, increase your brand visibility, improve direct booking conversion and obtain valuable data to optimize your marketing. At Roiback, we offer advanced PPC solutions that will help you maximize your brand potential and keep control over your customers - don't let others capture your leads! Make sure your hotel is the first choice when people search for your brand online.
