Did you know that over 84% of visitors to hotel websites leave without making a booking (Travel Outlook)? But don’t worry; retargeting can help you turn those missed opportunities into direct bookings!
Why is brand awareness so important?
The first step in the marketing funnel is brand awareness. Whether you trade online or offline, brand awareness is the foundation of your business. In a market as competitive as that for independent hotels, it's important that your brand is top-of-mind for your target audience and that it is prominent for them in their purchasing journey.
If your guests become familiar with your brand, they are more likely to decide on your services which means increased booking for your hotel. What is certain is that increasing it will leads you to achieve your business objectives such as customer retention and growth, increasing website traffic, building brand affinity and cultivating leads and conversions.
What is retargeting and how does it work?
Retargeting is a strategy to interact with the audiences who have visited your site. Retargeting allows you to reconnect with past visitors by serving them highly relevant ads based on their previous interactions with your site. By keeping your hotel’s brand and offers top-of-mind, you can significantly boost conversions- increasing them by up to 128% (Forms.app)—reduce reliance on OTAs, and maximise revenue.
There can be several reasons why a visitor hasn't converted to a booking. – it could be as simple as being distracted and then not returning to your site to complete a booking.
Retargeting is an extremely effective way to reclaim them. Your hotel's website adds a cookie (a very small file holding the data of the client and the website they were visiting) into the visitor's browsers.
You can use these to deliver content to your target audience through different channels like social media or search engines. When your audience is visiting different sites, you are able to display ads to remind them about your hotel. These are very effective at leading browsers to complete a purchase.
Facebook has its own ‘pixel’ which is a small snippet of code installed on your site. This allows you to collect information on shoppers who are also Facebook users and serve ads to them based on what they were browsing on your site. This information allows you to target extremely specific audiences which is why it is so effective. For example, if you find that the majority of your customers purchase on a mobile device, you can choose to serve your ads only to mobile users.
Once you know who is interested in your independent hotel, retargeting them is much easier, more cost effective and increases your return compared to targeting a whole new audience.
How can you increase your brand awareness through retargeting?
Brand awareness and retargeting are intrinsically linked. The more guests see your logo or your hotel name, the more it will stick in their mind.
When they are looking to book a hotel in the future, if you have strong brand awareness, it is more likely that your hotel will come to mind.
There are many ways of increasing brand awareness, such as customer advocacy, offline PR, email marketing, influencer marketing and social media. The power of retargeting is that you're using a visual format (70% of people prefer to learn through a visual medium) to show a customer something with which they are already familiar.
You can also show it to a segment of your audience based on geography and/or demography and on their device of choice. Dynamic retargeting campaigns make sure that you are giving your visitors fresh content based on what they need when they need it.
They enable you to meet your revenue goals in a much smarter way, as you are serving cost effective ads to the right audience while also building your brand awareness.
At Aró Digital Strategy, we focus on the best retargeting strategies for hoteliers—from dynamic ads featuring specific rooms and packages to abandoned booking recovery techniques. Discover how to craft personalised, cross-platform campaigns that drive results.
Ready to transform those almost-bookers into happy guests?
