When you are a small hotel owner with 30 rooms or less finding ways to generate new customers and bookings can be really challenging.
With the larger and more established brands relying on capital investment and resources to help them, you have to look for creative ways to help you stay at top of the stack when it comes to attracting new customers, convincing visitors on your website to book with you and then building strong relationships and friendships to help you generate sales.
With a budget against you, the weapons of choice to compete with the big guns are stacked against you. But with a little bit of creative thinking, you can not only compete with them, you can outsmart them.
Today we are going to discuss 5 powerful and effective ways you can play ball against the big guns and win new business
Build really strong partnerships
One of the benefits you can have is your link with your partners. The partners I am talking about here are the ones that you depend on for advice, for bookings, and for ideas.
Make it a habit to reach out to your partner representative on a monthly basis. Check out what's happening in the marketplace, ask about strategies and products that can help you stimulate new growth. Maybe your partner who provides you with your Google Ads can also help you with your Search Engine Optimisation.
Work on your website (Especially your conversion area)
Do you know what your website conversion rate is? In short, it's the number of bookings divided by the number of visitors and then multiplied by hundred.
For example, if you had 1000 people visit your website last month and you generated 50 bookings from these visitors then your conversion rate was 5%.
(50 bookings / from 1000 Visitors ) * 100 = 5% conversion rate
Your website partner should be able to assist you and advise you on ways to increase your conversion rate numbers. Reach out to them today to at least find out what yours is and then have a plan to invest time and money into increasing yours!
Be really social 'online'
Talk to others in your network. Even better, embrace these areas and best of all use your customer info to find new customers - we'll share this little Facebook secret! Facebook, for all its warts and issues, offers a powerful solution to help you reach new potential customers (new customers, who are just like your existing customers).
Facebook calls this "look-a-like audience targeting" and I will cover this briefly. Basically, this allows you to target people that match people who are similar to your customer profiles. Facebook knows a lot more about your audience than you do and what this allows Facebook to do is 'target' your ads to profiles in Facebook that mirror your customer profiles.
Be social and 'attend local events'
You're small and nimble which makes it easy for you to 'rock on down' to your local sporting event or town meetings. Not only will sponsorship help spread your brand you will be helping local teams in your area fund their sporting goals! Being small also enables you to pick and choose items of interest and events of value in your local area.
Love your customers
Key to generating more customer business is to communicate with your existing database. Remember that your existing customers will often generate 50% of your total yearly business each year so it's important to reach out and talk to them on a consistent basis.
You should consider investing time in managing your customer database on a platform like 'Mailchimp', and then build your campaigns with topics of interest and special offers that you will send throughout the year.? Planning in advance is key here. The best way to organise this is to plan well in advance (For instance during your low season) and invest your time into strategies and offers around times like Mothers day, long weekends, Easter weekend and even better still, if you know your customers date of birth send them a birthday message with a 5% off deal.
