When you’re trying to grow a hospitality business in a bustling city, such as Philadelphia, full of other eager entrepreneurs desperate to stand out, finding the best digital marketing techniques is incredibly important. Without implementing the following ideas, you could find yourself falling behind other businesses and losing out on local customers, which, in turn, means losing out on a bigger and better profit. The digital marketing techniques detailed in this guide will ensure that this doesn’t happen and instead will help you on your journey to growing your business.
Local SEO
While you might already have implemented SEO techniques within your business that have bought custom to your business from around the world, organic SEO isn’t enough to compete with your local competitors. The internet is used to search for almost everything these days from restaurants and hotels to plumbers and lawyers, and, more often than not, people will add “near me” onto the end of their search request. People want to find businesses near them quickly and without hassle, and if you don’t have a Local SEO strategy in place, your customers are going to go to another company that does.
The effective marketing technique will increase your visibility online within the area of Philadelphia, which means you can start to target the people who live there. This will involve doing several things:
- Google My Business – Setting up a business profile on Google My Business will inform customers where you are based, what your opening and closing times are, and your star rating and reviews. This will need to be regularly checked to ensure if customers have asked any questions, you can answer them.
- Backlinks from local businesses – Link building might have shown you success in your SEO strategy, so be sure to implement this with your Local SEO, too. Focusing your efforts on local newspapers and bloggers in the area will ensure that you are targeting Philadelphia customers.
Google Virtual Tour
Before people commit to buying a product or service, they will thoroughly research a company to ensure that they are trustworthy and reliable. Therefore, having positive reviews and testimonials on your website and Google My Business is a good place to start, even having a street view from Google Street maps is great, but why not take it one step further and invite your potential customers into your place of business without them even needing to leave their home. With 3D Google Virtual Tours, you can optimize your online content strategy by showing your local customers just how great your facilities are and what they could expect. This is an excellent technique for hotel owners, in particular, for instance, as you could show customers the floor plan and the different rooms you have on offer. Using only the best camera equipment, you can be sure that you can attract new customers and increase the number of bookings you take.
Engage More on Social Media
Taking the time to get to know the local people by engaging more on social media will ensure growth. All too often, businesses are so caught up in trying to utilize social media to bring them more custom that they forget they have a fantastic tool at their disposal to get to know their existing customers. If you take the time to engage with your current customers, it will show others how much you care, and you should find that your good reputation is only increased. People listen to other people’s recommendations, so you need not worry about trying to target thousands of new customers as you could find yourself gaining new customers simply through word of mouth.
To make sure this happens, though, you need to focus on creating a voice for yourself that stands out for all the right reasons. Once you have found this, you need to do some research into what social media platforms your existing customers use. Plan when you will post and then start to engage with your customers, but remember it doesn’t have to be too complicated, it could be as simple as keeping up to date with local affairs that will drum up a topic of conversation.