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Why Your Website Is the Most Important Part of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Why Your Website Is the Most Important Part of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Brian Fitzgerald
Brian Fitzgerald May 9, 2016
Why Your Website Is the Most Important Part of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Hotels engage in digital marketing to encourage direct bookings at their property. While a strong social media presence and PPC advertising are important to digital marketing, your hotel’s website is indispensable.

A good website reflects your brand, offers high-quality content and is easy-to-navigate.

Your website is the key to a successful digital marketing strategy because all other digital marketing elements direct guests to your website, which should effectively convert guests. Elements of website design that generate conversions are using best SEO practices, having a great user experience, and capitalizing on the wealth of analytics websites offer.

A website without effective SEO will not organically appear in the top spots on a SERP (search engine results page), and therefore won’t generate many clicks from Google, Bing, and other search engines. These clicks are critical to your digital marketing efforts because you need to drive as much traffic as possible to your site to generate direct bookings.

Even the most beautiful website will be mostly ineffective without the proper use of SEO. Using keywords that guests are likely to search for and optimizing your site for search engines will improve your SEO and push your website to the top of the organic listings.

Travelers researching trips typically visit 38 sites before booking their vacation, according to Skift. If your site is only one of those 38 and the user experience doesn’t satisfy potential guests, they are unlikely to return to your site and are even more unlikely to book a room.

In contrast, a great user experience on a site will prompt guests to explore your hotel further and they will begin to imagine the experience they will have staying at your hotel or inn.

While Facebook and Twitter offer limited analytics to track marketing campaigns and tweets, your website has the ability to collect comprehensive information on who your guests are, how they find your site, and what they view while on your site. This information is invaluable when trying to understand and pinpoint your guests and can be used to market your resort to a targeted, engaged population.

Websites are able to capture much more information about how guests engage with your website and brand than social media analytics.  Aside from data on your guests, website analytics have the power to track marketing campaigns so you’ll quickly be able to determine how successful a campaign is by using these analytics.

According to Jay Haverty, CEO of d50 Media, most marketing budgets in 2015 allocated 25-30% towards digital marketing. All of these digital marketing efforts attempt to drive guests to the brands’ websites.

If they are not capable of converting guests, your digital marketing efforts will be unsuccessful, highlighting the importance of websites to digital marketing strategies.

 

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