Niche Marketing Strategies

Marketing a Hotel and Motel Reservations Business

The value and earning capacity of a hotel and motel reservations business largely depends on the quality of its marketing efforts. But great marketing takes a lot more than hanging a shingle and hoping for the best.

Marketing is not a siloed business function. It's a cross-organizational discipline with ramifications for your balance sheet and earnings statement.

These days, most businesses are counting on the fact that their marketing plans will push them ahead of their competitors and deliver the best possible market share. With marketing pressure at an all-time high, your business needs to incorporate tactics designed to position a hotel and motel reservations business at the top of the heap.

Promotional Calendars

Sloppy marketing programs have no place in growing hotel and motel reservations businesses. A strategy chocked full of time-sensitive ad placements and other tactics can devolve into a tangled mess of overlapping deliverables unless it is coordinated in a promotional calendar. Good calendars include not only tactical deadlines, but also schedules for the inputs (e.g. staff assets, vendors, etc.) that are required to execute strategic objectives. When used in tandem with a quality mailing list provider, promotional calendars can ensure the continuous execution of direct mail campaigns.

Company Website

Without the right technological tools, your business is on the fast track to failure. The technological entry point for your hotel and motel reservations business is also the anchor point for your technological strategy: A company website. Although many businesses have a website, a poorly designed and unnavigable website is worse than having no web presence at all. Your site is a representation of your business; it needs to convey the same professional appearance and functionality as you expect from any other sales and marketing asset. But you will also need to consider how you will attract visitors to your site and what you will do with them once they are there -- and that means you'll need to include SEO and conversion path considerations in the web design process.

Industry Resources

Lone rangers don't survive long in a hotel and motel reservations business. Although there is a tendency to believe that the challenges you face are unique to your business, your competitors face many of the same marketing hurdles and obstacles. To overcome those obstacles, you'll need to tap into industry resources. The best resources are usually the ones that leverage industry-specific experience and the input of proven veterans.

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