Digital audit

Many of our hotel and resort clients have entered a waiting game, and for some who have scaled back or closed the doors, they are casting around for next priorities on their crisis response list. When the tasks become less critical you may want to consider getting your ducks in a row for the recovery phase throughout your digital strategy as it’s the first channel people will be looking at with recovery on the horizon. 

Here are a set of tasks and projects you could look into with your agencies:

Channel strategy review
When was the last time you looked closely at the sales and ROI through each of your channels? Now could be a good time for a quick review.

We know that some properties don’t consider changing channel investments from one year to the next, due to lack of familiarity, lack of knowledge or expertise, or because they just don’t see the return. Some of the biggest hospitality brands in the world invest the majority of their budgets on B2C sales, and online, because they see the results in black and white. Take another look and consider it.

Do this with half a mind on the recovery demographic:

• Origin: Obviously the countries that recover fastest
• Demographic: Probably younger audience—not likely to be older or have families
• Psychographic: Adventurous, travel addicts—and of course those who feel the sting of having missed out and are ready to rebook after cancellations 

But above all, look to business travellers. The catastrophic impact on the MICE industry should come back hard and fast as businesses scramble to make up for lost ground. 

SEO Audit
While revenue from online bookings remains largely driven by PPC and other direct advertising, organic SEO is the ticket to long term high value bookings. Optimising a website for specific sets of keywords once, then maintaining the presence of those keywords and related content through time is a low budget to long term presence in the search engine results pages of Google, Yahoo and other global search engines.

If you haven’t done keyword research then you need to consider it now, then rewrite your page content accordingly. Then have your agencies collaborate on building out the more technical aspects of SEO to ensure the maximum value of the new keyword/phrase oriented content. It’s a longer term tactic as Google can take months to reindex all sites online according to content, but the payoffs can be distinct and clear.

Performance review
And while you’re at it, check your site speed. Many industries suffer from significant dropoff in user engagement and rate of abandonment if the website experience is too slow. Hotel and hotel brand sites don’t suffer from this so much since the average user on your site is there for a reason, with purpose, which adds a higher level of forbearance. However nobody will wait around for too long for your images to load. 

Conversion optimisation audit
So the site is fast, and it’s getting into Google organic search, why are bookings still low? You may want to spend a bit of time looking at conversion optimisation. This is the process of analyzing the website to understand what forces of design and layout are affecting booking intent and completion. It is often because your booking mask is not sufficiently visible, or you have no call to action, maybe your website looks old fashioned and outdated and people just don’t trust to book on your site, or maybe you offer no best price guarantee or other direct booking benefits (which has come standard). There are many different possible reasons, a tiny change could be the difference between an extra 20 bookings or 200 bookings per year. That’s a big potential return.

Analytics audit
Finally, do you actually know who visits your website and what they do on it? What age range they are, nationality, gender, what banner ads they clicked on, what pages on the website they prefer to visit and which ones get the most natural organic visitors, what website they were on previously, what general industries they work in, interests they have? All this and more is data readily available in Google Analytics, a free tool, amongst many tools, which provides extensive essential insights into the audience for your brand and property.