Business websites replaced corporate presentations and company brochures in the last couple of decades. It’s almost impossible to imagine a successful company without a well-designed site that ensures intuitive and comfortable user experience.
This is particularly important in the hotel business since tourists tend to book online. Given the fact that the global hotel industry is worth over $500 billion, creating a dysfunctional website practically means that you lose the chance to grab your own share of this huge market.
The only way to turn website visitors into future hotel guests is to create appealing content that fits the overall site structure. Unfortunately, most hotels stick to well-known design principles and don’t want to invest in more advanced solutions.
Our goal is to help you go beyond standard options. In this post, we will show you four unobvious website tricks to help grow your hotel business.
1. Define a Buyer Persona
Everything you design - from website architecture to creative content - depends on your average client. You need to construct a buyer persona and identify their traits to make sure your site complies with their needs and requirements. This means you have to learn everything about the average website visitor. Here are the most important details that you need to figure out:
- Age and gender: Who are you addressing? Are they a 20-something college student who wants to party all night long? Or are they a retired accountant who just wants to take a good rest? Your style and online presence function differently in these two cases, so you must know basic information such as age and gender.
- Location: Emily Edwards, a web marketing specialist at Careers Booster, said, “Each country has its own peculiarities, which means you need to adapt your site content accordingly. This makes location one of the most important elements of website design and marketing in general.”
- Income level: Do you attract low-income visitors or premium guests? The way you answer strongly affects website appearance.
- Education: Educated people prefer quality content backed by historical and cultural references, while less demanding visitors want simpler and straightforward site content.
- Values and interests: Some guests put an emphasis on F&B content, while others prefer outdoor activities or cultural events. You need to indulge the average guest and design your website to match and highlight these requirements.
2. Growth Driven Design
Instead of traditional design, a process that tends to create one-size-fits-all solutions, you should embrace new concepts. A growth driven design succeeds in minimizing the risks of traditional web design through a systematic approach that shortens the time to launch by focusing on real impact, and continuous learning and improvement.
This means that your website doesn’t take a definitive form upon construction. On the contrary, you can keep changing it to fulfill user requirements. It’s essentially a two-fold concept, and we will present you both of its phases:
Phase 1: Strategy, Research and Launch
In this phase, you need to analyze the data you acquired when you defined the buyer persona. Using this information, you can sketch the buyer’s journey and design a website to solve users’ pain points.
Phase 2: Growth Driven Design Cycle
The second stage of the process is much more complex and versatile. It consists of an ongoing experimentation during which you need to improve site elements that proved to be inefficient. This happens in real time, so your website keeps evolving without a pause.
3. Use the Right Data
The growth driven design would be impossible without the right data. You need to explore user behavior to truly grasp their needs and intentions. Of course, it all starts with Google Analytics. This tool automatically collects site-related information free of charge, so it’s the first instance for website analysis.
It allows you to create customized reports, focusing exclusively on metrics that matter the most. Google Analytics also allows you to understand why visitors are bouncing off your website, which social platforms you should target, what the most popular type of content is, etc.
However, you still need to run a few other tests to make sure you’ve got everything covered. These analyses include heat map tests, content and form placements, CTA tryouts, different workflow creations, and other tests that can discover and improve user engagement.
4. Hire a Professional Agency
Although it would be perfect to manage your site single-handedly, it’s much better to hire a professional agency to give you a hand with website development and marketing automation. HubSpot is one of the most productive solutions in that respect because it offers a wide range of products that can help you attract guests from all over the world.
This tool provides clients with software that can control your content management, improve your social media presence, and enhance search engine optimization. As such, HubSpot helps hotel businesses develop more effective websites and earn more customers in the long-term.
Besides that, you can also connect with your leads and find new prospects through email tracking, pipeline management, and HubSpot scheduling features. We are not saying that you can’t handle all these processes on your own, but it’s so time-consuming that we definitely recommend you stick to specialized services.
Conclusion
Designing a hotel business website is not an easy task. First of all, you have to apply state of the art web design practices, and secondly, you need to take industry peculiarities into the calculation. This process is indeed difficult, but it’s not impossible. In this post, we showed you four unobvious website tricks to help grow your hotel business.
These tactics could turn your site into a guest generation machine, so don’t hesitate to try them soon. If you have additional suggestions or any inquiries about this topic, feel free to let us know in the comment section, and we’ll be glad to answer you!
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