Promotion is a vital activity for the hospitability industry. There are various media through which a destination can advertise its services and the Internet is the fastest growing one. The printed advertisement is becoming less and less efficient nowadays.
Companies still invest huge sums to promote their products in various magazines but their circulation and readership is diminishing. Nowadays, even the print media needs to establish itself on the Internet. After all, the newspapers websites are often the most visited ones therefore the best for advertisement placement. Unlike the printed media, the internet can provide fresh news 24/7. According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper web sites attracted an average of 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of the 2008 or 12 per cent more than the year before. The on-line advertising has grown 18.8% last year. Some hotels receive even 70% their total reservations online. The popularity of Internet for booking is continuously rising.
Obviously the Internet is no more the medium of the future it is the medium of present. Every sensible hotelier runs a web page promoting their hotel these days. Just having a web page, however, is not enough. Internet marketing requires a more active approach. The page of course needs to be well structured and well designed. Than you can move to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A hotel web page needs to be easily findable by a search engine and it also needs to have a good ranking. There are various ways of achieving a good engine search ranking among others it is the pay-per-click advertising. This method will help to stimulate popularity results for the site. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that just getting a visitor to your page is not enough. What really matters is the number of reservations, the site generates. The Internet advertising is also almost totally measurable which makes quick evaluation and continual adjustments possible.
