Hotel Marketing Strategies that Attract Eventcation Business
TLDR:
You may have heard the word “eventcation” a lot lately. It’s not a new idea, but it’s gaining traction in trend-pieces lately because people are increasingly planning travel around concerts, festivals, and other events. Think Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Many visitors investing in tickets decide to stay a few days and enjoy the host city.
Marketing strategies for hotels can connect the dots between big draws and other reasons to build a vacation — or at least a long weekend. They can position your hotel as the perfect place to stay and make a persuasive case. Best of all, they’re not complicated, relatively affordable, and are easy to update as new interest-drivers emerge.
What are Eventcations?
What are eventcations? Essentially, this trend involves booking a vacation around a major event, like a concert or festival. Unlike the traditional weekend trip, travelers are extending their stays longer, getting the most out of their flight or drive.
This is not a new idea. Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany remains a huge draw for travelers, who flock to the city over the course of the long festival. However, experience tourism is becoming a larger trend and hotel marketing strategies must adapt in order to position hotels for consideration.
Eventcation Marketing Strategies for Hotels
If more travelers are basing their plans around events, what can hotels do to reap the benefits? We asked this question to a few specialists around O’Rourke. Here are their responses.
Events feed hotel SEO strategies beautifully. It might be a fan eagerly awaiting a concert tour date announcement, or someone noticing a social post for a craft beer festival. Your region may not be on their radar until that moment! Then, the searches begin. Look ahead to events like these, working as far into the future as possible. Keyword planner tools like SEMrush can quickly identify search terms used by people planning travel. For example, “hotels near pechanga arena.”
Create blog posts or a regularly-updated events calendar on your website using the most relevant terms you can find. This helps you get noticed when people go searching. Get creative! Help them envision their eventcation with you. People could turn that one-night concert into a five-night stay at your hotel, even if you’re located an hour away. Come for the show, stay nearby and enjoy a wonderful destination nearby. Marketing agencies can help identify keywords and quickly create meaningful content to capture interest — then extend the strategy to future events.
—Conor O’Kelly, Special Projects Manager
Spin top events into hotel advertising campaigns. Lightweight ad units like Google Performance Max allow marketers to easily swap in messages and images highlighting special events. Give people a compelling reason to visit, or retarget people who visited your website with a special offer for the nights of the event. If you’re working with an agency, make sure they understand how to target people effectively. If they’re on the ball, they should be able to identify your most likely eventcation customers and drive a high return on marketing spend.
—Lucas Firmino, Digital Account Manager
Make your hotel website a local events guide. Does your website have a natural place for nearby events and local happenings? Consider an updated website experience that includes easy-to-find and fun-to-browse events. This feeds SEO, gets people excited, and, done right, leads to more direct bookings. Talk to your web team about ways of optimizing your website for events while creating a booking experience with as few steps as possible.
—Maria Allegrini, Account Executive
Don’t Miss Out on Potential Bookings
Our takeaway: people are increasingly spending on experiences, not more stuff. Creating marketing strategies that position your hotel for nearby events can capitalize on the growing eventcation trend, as people seek to maximize their time away by filling them with unforgettable moments.
Proximity is important, but that’s just the start. Showcase everything you have to offer — packages, nearby attractions, great places to eat and explore — help them envision a trip that starts with an event and extends for several days in your neck of the woods. By piggybacking marketing strategies around the big draw, you can build a plan that drives more direct bookings for more nights, on an ongoing basis, using the same playbook each time. What does that playbook look like for your hotel? It depends on so many factors! Fortunately, the marketers at O’Rourke specialize in building bespoke marketing strategies for hotels that drive direct, measurable revenue. Talk to us today about ways we can grow your business through Eventcations — and any other factor sending visitors to your region.