Like many businesses, hotels need to draw potential guests to their site so that the hotel can convince them to book a stay. Sometimes, hotel owners can find that they’re getting people to find their site, but they can’t get potential guests to actually book.
SEO can help lead people to your website, but hotel conversion problems aren’t uncommon, and it can be confusing as to why people aren’t making the decision to schedule a stay at your hotel. Conversion rate optimisation can help because it’s specifically designed to improve the conversion of traffic in your website. These are some of the top optimization tips that you can use to boost your hotel bookings.
One of the first things that you should do when you want to increase your online conversion rate for your hotel is to create personas of your typical guest that you want to attract. When you make a persona of your typical target guest, you’ll be able to better identify their wants and needs. For instance, attracting families that are looking for a place for the kids to play in a hotel is very different than attracting senior couples that are looking for a quiet place to stay that has comfortable beds. And the business person on a trip might be looking for different amenities than both the families and the senior couples. To better understand who you’re trying to reach, figure out some of the demographics of your target audience, such as:
• Occupation
• Age range
• Gender
• Personality traits
• Level of education
It’s no secret that people have short attention spans when they’re online, and you want you landing page to address their needs as quickly as possible. That’s why you should look at what stage of the buying process your target customer is likely to be in.
If you understand your potential guests’ frame of mind that they will likely be in when they go to your website, you’ll be able to create landing pages that directly relate to what they’ll likely want at the particular point that they’re at in the buying process.
For instance, the frame of mind that someone is in when they reach your page and need to book a hotel for the next night is different than a person who needs to book a hotel but doesn’t know what they want, yet. And other people might have already looked at several hotels and have a good idea of what they want. You need to figure out how to reach a variety of people at different points of the buying experience.
Even when you have a pretty good idea of which types of guests you’re trying to attract and which elements on your website are the most likely to draw in your target guest, you don’t really know if you’re right in your hypotheses until you put some time into testing.
AB testing, also called variant testing, is one way that you can figure out which elements are helping your conversion strategy and which ones you can improve. Through this type of testing, you can isolate individual elements and test out which of two or more designs of the same element do more work in helping you convert shoppers into people who make hotel direct bookings on your website. You can also learn about which placement is most effective. You’ll even learn which elements are dead weight or even deter people from booking with your hotel.
Improving your conversion rate optimisation to get more hotel direct bookings is an ongoing process. You need to continue to look for better ways to boost your conversion rates because, even if you were to find an ideal formula for your hotel’s conversion rate optimization, your business is always changing, and your target guests might change over time, too. You might also learn a new, key piece of information about your target audience that you want to focus on through the amenities that you place emphasis on through your landing pages. It’s a never-ending process that requires time and energy, but you’ll eventually reap the rewards when you see your bookings increase over the course of several months. Contact Mediatropy Digital Agency today, to get started.
Don't be shy — say hello and we'll be glad to kickstart your next exciting digital marketing journey.
