The ideal luxury resort provides guests with magnificent amenities to immerse themselves in and enjoy all that life has to offer. Your website is a powerful persuader of all the positive things about your resort.
Online advertising is a key tool to help you to market your property. You can have the best resort in the world but if no-one knows about it, no-one will come.
Paid ads online allow you to produce
highly targeted campaigns for your desired luxury travelers (for example by demographic, geography, special interest) and accurately measure results.
There are a huge range of luxury resort advertising strategies. Take advantage of limitless potential of the Internet to market your resort.
If you want to have the best performance, it's better to adopt several of these strategies to create a diverse advertising mixture.
We'll dive into advertising for luxury hotel resorts and learn more about the different options which are available.
Why is luxury hotel resort advertising important?
There are several reasons:
- Generate more direct bookings
- Pursue your branding objectives
- Build up guest awareness
- Convey your brand values
- Highlight your qualities
- Showcase your amenities
Resort advertising not only helps you to stand out from your competitors, but it also helps you to communicate your unique selling points to existing and potential guests.
What are the effective luxury hotel resort advertising platforms and strategies?
1. Search Engine Advertising
Search engines play the key part in connecting potential guests with your property. Luxury guests who are planning for a trip invariably start looking for a luxury resort on a search engine such as Google.
Search engine advertising for luxury resorts allows your property to increase its visibility on result pages.
With a paid ad, your organic (free) listing and a Google Hotel ad in the knowledge panel, your resort will dominate the results page.
A key benefit of search engine advertising is that it is under your control.
You can write the copy, highlight special offers, and add links which take browsers directly to your landing pages.
Your budget is down to you and you can measure the return accurately and adjust as required.
2. Social Media Advertising
Social media is an excellent channel for promotional content and hotel ads. Luxury resorts should consider several social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Create a diverse social media advertising mix, with a combination of text-based hotel ads, web content, image and video content and promotional material specifically tailored for each channel.
Facebook is good for promoting events e.g. spa days or regattas, and Instagram is great for highlighting the visual appeal of your resort.
They offer excellent target selection as you can select core, custom, and lookalike audiences.
3. Display advertising
Display advertising is the process of placing visual ads for your service on other websites.
It uses a ‘push’ approach as you are placing your content in front of all browsers of those sites.
You can choose certain sites, place ads by context (e.g. on high net worth traveler sites or lifestyle sites) or use remarketing to show your ads to browsers who have previously bought from you.
Although the use of ad blockers is increasing it is still a huge market. The Google Display Network allows you to target the right person at the right time on the right website.
4. Retargeting advertising
This is a specific form of display advertising which reminds your website visitors of your services or prompts them to complete an action when they have left without some kind of conversion (subscribe, email sign up or booking).
Retargeting primarily targets audiences who have visited your website or social media profiles without converting to a booking.
Using the Google Display Network and Facebook you can reconnect with people who have already interacted with you, making this an extremely cost-effective way of increasing both sales revenue and customer loyalty.
5. Email Advertising
Promoting your resort via email to your existing database is still a cost-effective and productive technique.
Consider a wide range of promotional content from short snippets of news from your resort which keep you top of mind to longer articles detailing for example green initiatives or community work.
Special offers should be advertised via
email campaigns and give you the ability to target specific demographics or guest profiles.
6. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is effectively a form of advertising. It helps your resort to reach certain specific demographics in a less overt way than traditional methods.
It is important that you choose an influencer with an appropriate network with whom they have built up trust. They will stay at your hotel and provide content, generally on social media, with positive messaging about their stay.
For some people this will work really well. It feels less pushy as it is coming from a third party and resonates more as they have a similar set of values and beliefs.
7. Video Advertising
Video content popularity has grown exponentially recently and video advertising for resorts is more powerful than ever.
Videos convey information in a shorter time, are easily viewed, shared and interacted with. They also allow you to create a narrative around your hotel and tell its story.
Showcase your high-quality amenities and facilities through video-based resort hotel ads across all platforms.
8. User Generated Content Advertising
A type of promotional content which is generated directly by guests - it could be photographs shared on social media platforms, videos on blogs and YouTube or online reviews.
As with influencer marketing, it feels more authentic and less promotional as it comes from travelers who have already stayed at your resort.
You can encourage guests to post this type of content by creating hashtags e.g. #resortbeachsunset #resortcocktailhour and holding monthly competitions for the best posts.