Executive Summary
The analysis of online marketing challenge is aimed at improving the performance of a hotel in the competitive Australian industry. In this case, the Managing director of the hotel needs to understand means of optimizing the internet marketing to improve the performance of the hotel.
The challenge of online marketing necessitates the use of online resources and approaches to increase the number of audience to the hotel’s site. As a result, it would increase the number of sales as well as the company generating revenue through some online activities.
Introduction
Online marketing refers to the advertising and promotion products and services through the Web or e-mail in order to increase the sales or information about the content. Most organizations conduct online marketing using e-commerce models that are designed to reach their targeted clients. The common internet approaches adopted include web advertising, email marketing, and social media promotion.
Due to competition, organizations attempt to create appealing and captivating sites, which offer the best adverts for their products. This is attributed to the placement of organizations to a common platform in the internet irrespective of the sizes.
In addition, the utilization of online marketing enables an organization to market its products to a wider customer base at cheaper rates (Demiray 2011, p.48). Although there are many benefits associated with online marketing, there are critical issues that organizations should consider before exploring the marketing strategy.
Internet marketing
Primarily, the hotel has to identify its targeted consumers before launching online marketing. Such an understanding is vital based on the products or services that one intends to offer. Various factors such as gender, age, educational level, disposable income, and occupation of clients influence the nature of marketing to be designed.
When such issues have been addressed, it is crucial to identify the appropriate sites and sections where the adverts should be placed. In most cases, the expenditure cost and objectives of the hotel influence the choice.
However, the common issues to be considered include volume of traffic, quality of existing ads, page ranking of the sites and presence of rivals (Janal 2011, p.96). Consequently, the hotel would be forced to design its adverts appropriately using the appropriate keywords.
Once the hotel has identified the best sites and nature of advertising to conduct, it is critical to determine the type of internet marketing to adopt. The common types of internet marketing include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SOE), and Search Engine Results Page (SERP). SEM refers to the means of improving the traffic to the web based on the ads of the products.
This method aims at addressing the needs of customers as well as provision of information on how to acquire the products. SEO involves the use of appropriate words that optimize the ranking of web pages in search engines. In this case, it improves the chances of internet users visiting the site due to its ranking. SERP entails the appearance of the web pages when a search engine query is inserted.
This implies that when the appropriate keywords are used the site will appear in frequently compared to the other pages (Johnson 2010, p.3). These issues will assist the hotel in developing ads that would suit the needs of the people as well as choice of sites that have high traffic.
Core areas of online marketing
Online marketing demands the understanding of the core issues such as keyword analysis, content marketing, email marketing, search marketing, and affiliate marketing. Keyword analysis is the use of appropriate keywords that internet users utilize in most cases while using search engines. This implies that the hotel should search for popular words in order to attract traffic and convert it to sales.
Content marketing involves the organization of appealing information to captivate the attention of audience. The content is vital in providing useful information to the audience, which attracts them to revisit and assess other available services. E-mail marketing is the use of messages to communicate with customers when they provide their emails to the hotel (Labbé 2011, p.26).
In essence, the hotel should maintain emails of its clients in the database for consistent communication with clients on the new updates and products that it offers. Search marketing involves the marketing of products through opportunities that exist in the search engines. Affiliate marketing is the use of other sites to advertise the products in order to market the services of the hotel.
Following the understanding of the appropriate method to adopt in online marketing, the hotel should decide on the means of increasing the number of audience visiting the site. In this regard, the hotel ought to utilize the AIDA concepts to enhance the information that users can access from the site. AIDA involves the creation of content that attracts attention, interest, desire, and action.
For this reason, the audience would be able to undertake some initiatives of conducting sales or acquiring products from the site. On the other hand, the hotel should be able to analyze the traffic capacity of its site and improve on the performance of the site (Levinson & Rubin 2010, p.122).
Consequently, the site would be able to attract the users as the hotel utilizes other means of advertising such as banner ads, pop ups and links from other sites.
Online marketing resources
The use of online marketing necessitates the hotel to use vital online resources. The main online resources include aMember, Digg, Feedburner, Flickr, Google Adsense, Google Adwords among others. aMember is a plugin that enables sites to integrate PHP for users to undertake online payments through provision of authorization and privacy of the website.
In most cases, users have to subscribe with the site to enjoy the services. Digg is a resource that offers the hotel with a chance to provide their news to the community. In essence, it enables the hotel’s sites to post its articles in the internet with the most recent articles appearing at the top of the list. This enables the users to access further information in the hotel’s site through the links offered.
Feedburner offers free statistics for the number of visitors in a site as well as a chance to subscribe for free emails and articles. Flickr is a resource that enables the hotel to upload and share photos, which improves the presentation of information to the audience (Sheehan 2010, p.146).
Google AdSense is a resource that enables web publishers to advertise and market their products. Google offers the publishers payments for posting ads in the sites. For this reason, the hotel can earn some revenue through publishing ads in its sites. On the other hand, Google AdWords provided advertisers a chance to offer their products through provision of their ads with distinct keywords.
The advertisers usually pay when their ads are clicked, and for this reason, it creates an opportunity for the hotel to increase its profits by offering such services.
These vital resources should be incorporated while the means of payment such as PayPal and Moneybookers are integrated in the sites. As a result, the hotel would make money through the services it offers in its site as well as sales made through acquisition of its services or products (Scott 2007, p.104).
Conclusion
Online marketing is a vital concept that entails multiple variables to exhaust and achieve the desired needs of the hotel. Based on this situation, the hotel should adequately prepare resources to invest in the program to realize the full potential.
Moreover, the hotel should understand the nature of risks attributable to the hotel such as privacy and security of the site. Such issues offer consumers power to interact with services offered in the site. Furthermore, it ensures that the consumers are sensitized on the activities that are involved in the enhancement of service delivery within the hotel.
Recommendations
Blogging forms a crucial component of internet marketing since the hotel can present its information or issues in a casual manner. In this regard, the products of the hotel can be covered in depth with respect to the interests of the consumers. Furthermore, the hotel has the ability to assess the response of the consumers since they can present their comments (Sudhaman 2004, p.2).
For this reason, interactivity between the hotel and its consumers is enhanced leading to effective way of understanding customers’ behaviors and preference. This issue leads to the presentation of products or services that suit the needs of the clients. Meanwhile, the hotel should adopt internet services such as auto-respondent, call to action and cannibalization.
Auto-respondent services enable the hotel to respond instantly to the needs of clients as a cycle of activity of the site. The call-to-action is a technique that would allow consumers to take an appropriate action based on the nature of the site, which increases the level of sales (Loda 2011, p.33).
At the same time, cannibalization would allow the hotel to utilize the sites of other companies to source for clients or customers. As a result, the number of customers visiting the site would increase leading to the expansion of client base, which improves the profitability of the hotel.
The use of social sites for marketing also plays a crucial role in internet marketing. The growth and expansion of technology has enabled many people to interact and share through social sites. Some of the common sites that have contributed to creation of partnership, friendship, and associates include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Hi5 among others (Scott 2007, p.85).
In this case, the hotel should exploit these avenues to access customers and create a good rapport with them to enhance sales. In most cases, the social sites allow users to create pages that market their products as well as connection with vital human resource for the growth of the hotel.
Essentially, the hotel could adopt the social sites to create awareness of their site amongst the social site users, which improves the traffic to their site due to ability to offer their link in the social sites.
When internet users visit the website of the hotel, it is possible to offer them a chance to present their views and remarks. Most of the common types of user-generated content that users can offer include product reviews, comments of the websites and forum entries. The User-Generated Content enables the hotel to increase interaction with the audience as well as market effectively their products.
At the same time, the hotel has the ability to review the content of the site to create appealing image of the hotel through use of SEO. The use of User-Generated content can be integrated with blogs, photos and video, which improves the quality of information received by the audience.
Some of the main hotels that have exploited the User-Generated Content include TripAdvisor, Goodreads, Allrecipes and Craiglist. Following these crucial services of the site, the hotel can improve the nature of its services or products being offered in the market (Grossnickle & Raskin 2010, p.145).
References
Demiray, U. 2011. Marketing online education programs frameworks for promotion and communication. Information Science Reference, Hershey PA.
Grossnickle, J., & Raskin, O. 2010. Handbook of online marketing research. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Janal, D. S. 2011. Online marketing handbook: how to promote, advertise, and sell your products and services on the Internet. J. Wiley, New York.
Johnson, T. 2010. Australian Tourism Minister Lawlor Says New Tourism Queensland Online Marketing Guide to Help Queensland Tourism Operators, Washington, D.C., Malaysia, Washington, D.C.
Labbé, M. 2011, “A natural partnership: Tourism & Online Marketing”, International Trade Forum, , no. 2, pp. 26-27.
Levinson, J. C., & Rubin, C. 2010. Guerrilla marketing online: the entrepreneur’s guide to earning profits on the Internet. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
Loda, M.D. 2011, “Comparing Web Sites: An Experiment In Online Tourism Marketing”, International Journal of Business and Social Science, vol. 2, no. 22, pp. n/a.
Scott, D. M. 2007. The new rules of marketing and PR: how to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, & online media to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, N.J..
Sheehan, B. 2010. Online marketing. McGraw Hills, New York.
Sudhaman, A. 2004, Tourism Australia lifts online marketing plan, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Hong Kong.