If your property doesn't have its own website (and we mean more than just a page extension from your brand website), here are 5 reasons why you should consider getting one now. (Hint! If you have Vizlly, you already have the tools to create it).
1. Tell your Local Story.
Every property has its own story. And the stories you tell online can compel travel shoppers to choose you. No one knows your local story better than you – think local attractions, festivals, events, and restaurants. Often times these stories that happen at a local level can bring your property's uniqueness to life for a travel shopper, so it’s important to properly showcase and celebrate them.
Supplementing your presence on brand.com with a vanity website provides the opportunity to tell the whole story of your unique property, complete with its local personality. Create a ‘vanity’ website to highlight the uniqueness of your property and its local story to drive bookings.
2. Created Targeted Content and Pages
Having your own vanity site allows you to tell compelling stories about the unique features of your property, like food and beverage options, unique features for business travelers, or features tailored to events like weddings. Getting into these specific details will help you target your efforts in order to capture the attention of the guest segment you want.
Does your property have convention space? A beautiful location that makes it the perfect wedding venue? Create pages that target these segments and see improvements in conversion and organic search ranking for these terms.
Create targeted content that speaks to the segments you want to reach and differentiates your property from competitors.
3. Showcase Rich Visuals (that you control)
Many brand websites don’t fully support on-page rich media content like videos and virtual tours, but these richer forms of visual content can be the key to converting travel shoppers.
In addition, managing your own website means you can make updates to your content as things change. Make seasonal updates, publish user generated content, and showcase changes like renovations.
4. Make Updates in Real-Time
Maintaining your own vanity website allows you to control key content updates that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. With your own website, there is no long approval process that accompanies updates to text, offers or visuals. Login to your Vizlly Digital Marketing System, make your changes, and see the updates reflected on your website in real-time. This makes it easier, and more likely, for you to constantly have fresh content on your site – and that fresh content gives travel shoppers a reason to come back.
5. Enjoy Added SEO benefits
If you already have a brand website, you might be thinking that your brand already takes care of SEO for you -- which is probably true. But having your own website, optimized to tell your local story, will serve to complement the efforts of your brand.
When done correctly, having both a brand and vanity site can enhance SERP for the property by working in tandem with the brand site, having unique local content, and linking to it.
Comments
5 comments
Good info as we are beginning to re-do our website.
Having an independent website can be crucial to a property's well being. Often times there are limitations and strict stipulations put forth by the brand and a hotel can't market as they need to within those guidelines. We've been able to offer incredible packages partnered with local attractions for many of our hotels utilizing an external website.
Propelling argument as to why our hotel needs it's own site. Work to be done to see if the brand will allow it, but I can see why it would be important.
It's a definite benefit to hotel marketing.
It's never been more important than to tell your own unique hotel story on your website. This goes beyond just listing services and amenities that your property offers (although that is the first and necessary step). Telling your own hotel story should integrally rely on and leverage user-generated feedback/content that your guests are currently organically sharing with their own social networks while they are still on property. At my hotel, we do a weekly engagement review of guest/visitor content that was shared via Instagram posts, for example, and re-share some of our favorite pieces of content through social. The next step we are working on is to bring this great UGC storytelling content onto our website to better visually highlight those unique brand attributes :)
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