Hotel affiliate marketing can widen your market reach, increase your audience and conversions, and build a loyal audience. Affiliate marketing is beneficial in many industries, and hospitality is no exception. Consider making use of hotel affiliate marketing to attract customers and increase sales.
Although building a successful affiliate marketing program can be time-consuming, once it is set up there is significantly less work on your part than a traditional marketing strategy.
How does affiliate marketing work in the hospitality industry?
Hotel affiliate marketing is a marketing solution which makes use of affiliates to promote the products and services of a hotel, compensating them for successful sales or conversions. Affiliates tend to earn a set amount or percentage of profits from each sale made through their personalised affiliate links.
Generally, hotel affiliate marketing works by affiliates signing up to work for your company and then publishing their personal affiliate links across social media and websites to attract more customers from their audience. Whenever a sale is made through the clicking of the affiliate link, the hotel affiliate is paid a commission by the business. This commission can be determined through a number of factors, most importantly the audience size and engagement of each individual affiliate. Paying for marketing in this way means that you only have to pay your marketing costs once you have already made a sale, meaning no large payments for marketing that isn’t successful.
Affiliates are often social media influencers or bloggers who have amassed a strong following thanks to their content. There are several different levels of influencers and all have their different benefits. Working with affiliates is great for your business as it opens you up to a whole new audience and if you are working with a trusted affiliate or influencer with a strong audience relationship, you will gain loyal customers much more easily.
The benefits of hotel affiliate marketing
Generate more traffic
Working with hotel affiliate marketers means that you are having access to their whole audience. Affiliates often also increase linking and the number of websites and social media pages that link back to your company site. This will significantly increase traffic as well as your website’s rankings.
If you have set up your affiliate program on a performance-based payments strategy (which we’ll go over below), and audiences are clicking through to your website through affiliate links but not actually making a purchase, you are still receiving traffic but will not have to pay.
Increase in hotel occupancy rates
Affiliate marketing campaigns will work to drive customers to book stays in your hotel. This will increase not just your customer base but also your occupancy rate which is a great look for your hotel.
Performance-Based Payments
One of the benefits of affiliate marketing is the performance-based solution it provides to hotels. This means that hotel affiliate marketers are only paid when goals have been met. This could be anything from a set number of visitors to your website or a reservation and payment is received from a customer.
This is fantastic for hotels, given that only paying for performance ensures you already have the results you are after before you need to pay anything. Paying for performance also results in a higher ROI, as well as more freedom for the business to pursue goals, knowing that if they are not met you won’t lose out on significant sums of money.
Working with affiliates in a performance-based strategy keeps them committed and motivated, encouraging them to keep working until targets are met, to ensure they get paid. This means a significantly higher chance of achieving results than other traditional marketing models.
Easy to track
Affiliate marketing programs are easy to keep track of and work out which affiliates are profitable and which are wasting time and resources. There are some key performance indicators (KPIs) which can help give an overview of the performance of affiliate partners, and indicate areas of your marketing strategy that may need to be revisited. Some of the most common KPIs include looking at cost per click, cost per sale and click-through rate.
With so many benefits to hotel affiliate marketing, it seems like an obvious choice for businesses looking to expand their advertisement strategies. Affiliate marketing functions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can bring lots of new traffic to your site. If you work with affiliates on a performance-based payment basis, your affiliate partners will be motivated to work hard and increase traffic as well as sales, using their wide audience to benefit your brand. You will only have to pay for successful conversions, meaning you only spend money when your strategy has been successful.
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and how you can use it to grow your business, come along to the Elevate Summit this June.
