Executive Summary
This paper aims at revealing the website design concepts undertaken by the Nyali Beach Hotel. The study analyses the 4 P’s of marketing, and attempts to critique whether they have been used appropriately in this particular website.
Therefore, the paper provides a critical analysis of the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website by exploring the main purpose of the website, the business model used in the website, the main target customers for the website, and the consumer behaviour in relation to the website’s model.
More so, the paper analyses the role of the website in creating a good relationship with its customers. The analysis helps in identifying the strengths and the weaknesses of the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website, hence strengthening the website through providing recommendations for improvement.
Introduction
Web marketing is an interactive form of marketing, as it provides instant responses that makes it a unique form of marketing. Web marketing uses both technical and creative aspects of the internet marketing, including the 4P’s of marketing.
Web marketers have in the recent past analysed that a business cannot carry out effective web marketing without taking into account a good coverage of the products offered, the prices of the products offered, the placement of the products, and the promotion of the products offered.
This paper aims at providing a critique of web marketing of Nyali Beach Hotel. The hotel is a famous tourist destination due to its proximity to the Indian Ocean.
Discussion
Purpose of the Site and Its Business Model
Nyali Beach Hotel is a tourist hotel that makes money out of selling guest rooms as well as other goods and services including food and drinks, water sports, tennis, volleyball along the beach, darts, and snookers, among other services. The business is a B2C targeting tourists from developing and developed countries of the world, including the domestic tourists.
The hotel is also a B2B since the website contains links for booking hotel rooms in other international hotels (Nyali Beach Hotel n.d.). The hotel aims at selling its products to its target customer segment by portraying that it understands the needs of diverse customers, as it provides a variety of products that serve diverse customers, who have different economic capacities.
The hotel uses the website in carrying out bookings and payments for the bookings, while the services are enjoyed under the bricks and motors of the business. The 4 P’s of marketing create an avenue that helps the hotel in coming up with successful results.
The first P of marketing, which is the product, defines the Nyali Beach Hotel as a hotel that offers both goods and services to its guests. In doing so, the hotel considers a number of factors including presentation of the products, the safety of the product, and the quality of the products.
In a bid to sell these products to its customers, the hotel defines its target customers, defines ways in which the customers are able to acquire the product, and defines the reasons for choosing the hotel’s products by successfully showing up the details of the products, including the rooms that are on sale to the customers (Nyali Beach Hotel n.d.).
Thus, the website defines the functional and visual feel and look of the website, as the visual look encompasses the website layout, design features, colors, font choices, photographs, interesting graphics, outstanding photos for the beds, and a number of restaurants along the beautiful scenarios of the Indian Ocean.
The graphics suggest that the website targets all people from all lifestyles, who are on a holiday, honeymoons, and even on business trips.
The second P of marketing, which is place, is a crucial factor to consider when marketing since it defines the method by which the products being sold by the entrepreneur get in touch with the target customers (Alrawi et al. 2008). A good placement of the products entails an easy access to the company’s products through an effective search engine.
Effectiveness can be achieved through creating an opportunity for accessing multiple directories for the website. This can be facilitated by coming up with an appropriate domain name that has a common term in the search engine.
The domain name should also be memorable to the customers, and the website should not contain passwords or being connected to other complex software to open the website. The placement of the product should also entail how easy the customer is able to navigate through the website, select the most suitable product and purchase it.
The Nyali Beach Hotel makes sure that it falls on the major search engine by the virtue of its domain name. This implies that a customer can easily access the hotel while searching the beach hotels that are along the Indian Ocean. More so, the hotel enhances the degree of its placement by using affiliate marketing, whereby the affiliates facilitate an easy search of the hotel’s website.
Although the website does not have a “search button,” there are conspicuous links within the webpage page, which take the user of the website to another page, and this makes navigation quite easy while viewing the details of the product as well as making the bookings. In addition to this, the website has links that are well placed, and this enhances easy navigate of the registration form that gives way to making a booking.
The third P of marketing, which is promotion, entails the approach a website takes in creating attention to the potential buyers of a company’s products (Alrawi et al. 2008). Promotion can take a form of advertising through buying space on popular sites such as Google and the Yahoo.
Discounts can also play a critical role in promoting products on a website. Promotion, however, should target on the specific customers instead of the public.
More so, promotion becomes more effective when a company associates itself with social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs (Alrawi et al. 2008). This is crucial because it helps in knowing how the business is performing in terms of quality, as it encourages both positive as well as negative feedbacks.
This gives an organization the opportunity of receiving free information from customers’ feedback, thus eliminating the use of expensive surveys and the use of experimentations for assessing the business’ products. Association with social media can be effectively achieved through opening an account that contains the products of an organization, as it allows the business to participate in the discussion.
More so, blogs help in creating an opportunity for serving dissatisfied customers from the initial stages of their problem, thus improving the image of the business (Singh et al. 2008).
The Nyali Beach Hotel website has not successfully addressed promotion since it does not have a sign-up page for customers with personal emails that help them to order the needed services. In addition to this, the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website has not fully associated itself with the social media websites including the Facebook, Twitter, and blogs; hence, little has been done on promotion.
The website thus falls short of promotion since it does not address discounts or any other aspect relative to business promotion (Nyali Beach Hotel n.d.).
The fourth P of marketing, which is price, displays the amount that should be charged to the customers after deducting all the discounts and allowances. The price is normally arrived at after taking due consideration of the production cost, competitors pricing, and the condition of the market, among other factors (Alrawi et al. 2008).
Pricing should directly reflect the quality of products and services offered by a particular business. Indicating the price of the products on a website helps a company to define its target market, thus eliminating the unwanted customers segment.
With this respect, pricing attracts more clicks and consequently more enquiries from potential customers. Even though displaying prices makes the competitors see the pricing of products, providing high quality products for the customers helps the company to adopt premium pricing.
The pricing of the products at the Nyali Beach Hotel website is not displayed though it is relevant in web marketing because the website is meant for making bookings as well as accepting payments through the VISA cards, Master Cards, and other recognized credit cards (Nyali Beach Hotel n.d.).
The prices should indicate whether there is a difference in pricing between the low season and high season of the market for every product offered. The prices should also differentiate between the product sales per person, per couple, or per group reservation. However, lack of pricing for the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website could be attributed to a difference in prices between the online and the offline market.
Target Market for the Website and the Consumer Behavior
Before coming up with a recommendation for improving the Nyali Beach website, it is vital to carry out an assessment of the consumer behavior of the hotel. The assessment of the consumer behavior will identify the importance of improving the hotel’s website in a bid to increase the hotel’s booking.
This emanates from the fact that hotel websites are nowadays used as vehicles for serious revenue generation. A hotel website that reflects professionalism through design, easy navigation, and visual attributes helps the consumer to respond positively towards making bookings.
By using a case study method, data will be collected based on the importance of the role of Nyali Beach Hotel website in relation to providing feedback to questions relative to the hotel’s website.
Therefore, the target customers, who include adults aged between 24 and 40 years, are the main source of data because they will provide insight on the website operation and the various challenges that they encounter while making bookings through the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website.
The report will help the customers to voice their opinion as they are provided with the opportunity to evaluate the information in the website, thus attracting customer loyalty.
The evaluation of consumer behavior is of paramount importance since online booking is a contentious issue that is characterized by the gradually evolving ideas. Ip et al. (2011) assert that sales of products such as books, computer software, and music through a website is undemanding since it necessitates less inspection of the products; hence, the description provided helps in attracting customers without putting much effort.
The Nyali Beach hotel website, on the other hand, necessitates much effort since it attracts groups of people who have different objectives, including exploration of information without necessarily having to make a booking.
These findings emanates from statistics of the interview conducted on the hotel website with an aim of finding the consumer perception on the website search engine, retrieval of information contained in the website, evaluation on how the information is perceived, and the factors that facilitate or inhibit the booking process.
The professionalism of Nyali Beach Hotel’s website is thus put into question because it tends to turn off the act of booking as demonstrated by a number of factors. One of the factors that put the customers off is the fact that the hotel is not designed to handle hyper-interactivity.
In the recent past, consumers have changed the way they interact with websites following the introduction of hyperactive websites including Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, among others.
Due to the fact that the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website cannot handle hyper-interactivity, the consumer perceive the website as just a static brochure that is just accessible online; hence, the website attracts only a few consumers since it falls short of many customers’ expectations.
In order to make sure that the consumers get attracted to the Nyali Beach Hotel website, the web designers should make sure that it appears on the first page of the Google search.
However, it is recommended that the website can gain favor when it appears as the second or the third website from the top because, according to the consumer behavior, customers tend to ignore the first website and concentrate on the second, third, or the forth website site on the search engine(Pan et al. 2010).
More so, the case study carried out concerning the Nyali Beach Hotel customers shows that majority of customers do not intend to keep the information of the website for a long term basis, but instead focus on the information that would lead them to booking at that particular moment.
Hence, the time taken before a customer commits him/herself to booking a room at the Nyali Beach Hotel is of utmost importance since customers avoid wasting time on the internet. Therefore, the hotel should be able to display the features and prices of the product on sale in order to facilitate an effective booking process (Law & Cheung 2005).
The case study also indicates that many customers consider the FQA link on the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website as an ineffective link since it contains information that is not straight to the point. This creates a negative response to the booking process.
Building and Maintaining Relationships with the Customers
Many hotel bookers who intend to use website in making their bookings concur that the value of a website can be greatly increased through visual appeal. This appeal is normally judged within the first seconds of looking at a website. This creates the first impression of the website, and this generates an inspiration of making a booking (Mullet 2003).
Even though the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website needs some improvement on areas related to information management, responsiveness, and interactivity, among other factors, the website has is able to build and maintain its customers through a number of ways including website’s credibility, persuasion, personalization, and usability.
In the website’s credibility point of view, the Nyali Beach Hotel builds and maintains a relationship with customers by demonstrating trust, holding hotel information that is trustworthy, establishing a hotel booking office that aims at keeping the customers’ promises. More so, the organization helps the customers to get to the direction of the hotel in an appealing way that uses a map.
This helps in stirring up the customers’ imagination of the hotel, hence facilitating the booking process (Tsai et al. 2009). The Nyali beach hotels helps its customers in planning their trips by providing ways and means of contacting the booking office through the organization’s email, provision of customer services, and creating an opening for bookings that have special offers.
This helps in creating persuasion and personalization of the website users (Loda et al. 2009).
In the website usability point of view, the organization tends to create a first impression to the customer by making sure that the content of the website blend well with the images in the website, as most customers prefer looking at the current visual pictures before the product description. More so, the visual pictures should go hand in hand with varied and vital information that is should be kept up to date.
The information on the Nyali Beach website has been made easy to comprehend, easy to navigate, and the customer can easily locate additional information related to the hotel booking. In a bid to improve the usability of the website, the hotel deters from focusing on aggressive banners as a way of attracting potential customers since many customers have termed aggressive banners as distracting.
Recommendation for Improvement of the Website
A number of customer interface tools including a website’s context, commerce, community, and content characterize interactive marketing. These tools help in defining the reliability, competence, responsiveness, access, courtesy, security, and the credibility of a website (Yang & Fang 2004).
A hotel’s website should use both technical and creative aspects of the internet including effective advertising, attractive design, and superior development in order to facilitate convenient bookings.
In the context sphere, the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website creates a good customer interface because the website can be accessed quickly and easily, the product categories are clear, the product names are clear, and the site offers a good search. Mill and Law (2004: 240) affirm that a website creates a good customer interface if the site can be accessed quickly and provides room for customers’ comments.
Therefore, I would recommend that the customers using the website should be given a chance to air their views, opinions, and comments concerning the products portrayed on the website since this would facilitate effectiveness of the website, thus acting as a customer service center.
In the commerce aspect, the Nyali Beach Hotel website contains registration, which allows the site to store users information and preferences, credit-card approval, and order tracking.
I would recommend that the Nyali Beach website to clearly display the prices of variety of products provided and the modes of payment including a suitable interface for the recommended credit cards in order to facilitate advance payment for the bookings. This is also important to the hotel because it helps in saving the money used in the travel agency departments (Kumar 2010: 131).
In the community aspect, a convenient website should provide room for communication between users through emails or interactive chats, including a sign-up page for customers where they can signup for emails or SMS (Hanson & Kalyanam 2007: 57).
Even though the Nyali beach Hotel’s website has an organization’s email address that can be used as a customer service centre, it should also include a fan page on the popular social websites such as the Facebook and Twitter, where users can give their comments and get feedbacks of their comments, thus improving interactivity.
In the content sphere, a website defines all digital subject matter that includes video, text, audio, and graphics to convey the message of the site (Hanson & Kalyanam 2007: 103).
Although the context of the Nyali Beach Hotel implies that it targets customers of all ages from developing as well as the developed countries, I would recommend that the website should incorporate the graphics by showing its target market using photos of young and old aged customers from diverse parts of the world. This plays a critical role in enhancing the first impression of the website.
Conclusion
The critique of the Nyali Beach Hotel’s website put forward in this paper clearly proves that web marketing needs to be designed in such a way that it upholds the 4 P’s of marketing. It is clear that the impact of the 4 P’s cuts across every section of web marketing.
The Nyali Beach Hotel’s website has presented content that contribute to a well-structured piece of work, but fails to show a good interactivity with the users.
This website, however, would be most appropriate for anyone who wants to have a quick understanding of the products offered by the hotel, without necessarily making a booking since it takes substantial amount of time, and this is contrary to consumer behavior in the use of websites as a booking tool.
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