5 Hotel Marketing Tips to Fix Your Website and Boost Event Bookings

According to PwC’s forecasts, the outlook for the U.S. lodging sector remains relatively positive despite mixed economic trends, with occupancy levels to remain steady around 62.9% and the average daily rate (ADR) to increase 1.3% year over year. Given the lows and uncertainty of the past years, stability is a welcome outlook.

Growth-minded hotel groups are looking to  events to exceed their own growth targets.. With Zoom fatigue firmly set in and people eager to gather for personal and professional occasions, the full-force return of in-person events presents a great opportunity for hotels.

The ongoing expansion of global bleisure travel – the fusion of business and leisure – presents a significant growth opportunity for hotels. The bleisure market is projected to rise from $315.3B in 2022 to $731.4B by 2032, reflecting an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9%. Hotels can capitalize on this trend, especially by targeting corporate events bleisure travelers, to drive revenue and maintain higher occupancy levels year-round. Corporate event attendees can exercise the opportunity to extend stays before or after an event, often filling weekend rooms that may otherwise be vacant.

So, here’s the million-dollar (or multi-million dollar) question: Is your hotel marketing its event venue spaces effectively enough to attract a steady stream of bookings and beat out the competition?

Marketing your hotel’s event venue is no small feat. Unlike room bookings, which benefit from third-party platforms, promoting your event spaces requires more time, investment, and attention. Your website should be the go-to place for prospective event hosts, but if it’s not optimized, you could be missing out on key leads.

‍Here are five common mistakes hotel marketers make with their websites, and how to fix them:

1. A lack of information is driving your prospective customers away

For room bookings, your website provides all the information needed, often supported by third-party sites. However, when it comes to event venues, if your site doesn’t provide all the details a prospect needs to make a decision, you can’t rely on third-party platforms to fill the gaps.

A lack of relevant event information means potential clients might move on before you ever have a chance to engage. To address this, make sure your site supports your event business with the same level of detail and professionalism as it does for hotel room bookings.

Tips for improvement:

• Ensure that contact information for your event sales or management team is easy to find.

• Create dedicated pages for each event space, including essential information like capacity, photos, virtual tours, and types of events your venue can host. Ensure event venue details are easy to find from your homepage.

2. Accessibility issues are hurting your search engine rankings (and customers)

Your website is your hotel’s digital lobby, but are you making it as welcoming to every guest as your physical hotel lobby? You wouldn’t build your hotel with no ramp to accommodate wheelchairs; you shouldn’t build a website some people can’t use.  When it comes to websites, however, accessibility sometimes takes a backseat to other design choices.  

Online accessibility means designing websites that offer a user experience (UX) in compliance with laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These standards help web developers create sites that are easy for everyone to read, navigate, and interact with, ensuring equal access for all users.

While accessibility issues won’t directly harm your SEO rankings, poor accessibility leads to poor user experience (UX), increasing bounce rates and reducing conversions. Search engines will notice this and rank your site lower, which can hurt your event venue marketing.

Addressing accessibility issues can enhance marketing results for more than just disabled customers. It signals to potential event hosts that your venue is a thoughtful and inclusive partner, dedicated to ensuring the success of their event.

Tips for improvement:

• Familiarize yourself with and update your site to comply with the WCAG

• Use an Accessibility Checker to check whether your website is compliant with a specific country’s requirements

‍3. Your imagery isn’t capturing the true potential of your space

When it comes to top-of-the-funnel hotel marketing, first impressions matter—and for most people, the first impression they have of your hotel as a potential event venue comes from the images on your website.  

So, of course, you want to make any photo you include in your hotel marketing to be lust-worthy. The images should be a reflection of your overall brand aesthetic while communicating the potential of the space to potential clients. If your brand is all about luxury and sophistication, that chandelier in the background better be glistening.  

On the other hand, there’s only so much a photograph can convey about the potential of your space. That’s why so many hotel marketers are turning to 3D virtual tour software as an integral part of their event venue marketing.

With Prismm, for example, you can embed virtual catalogs on your site for your spaces, allowing clients to experience the flow of the rooms for a variety of event types. You can add new 3D layouts to a virtual catalog with a few clicks to help appeal to new prospective clients.  

If you’re looking to host more conferences in your hotel, you can show conference-ready layouts for your space. That way, your corporate clients don’t have to imagine what their event would be like by looking at pictures from past weddings.  

For many hotel marketers, embedding a 3D virtual tour on their site can increase conversions on the site and reduce the amount of marketing budget spent retargeting reluctant prospects.

Tips for improvement:

• Hire a professional photographer to create photos that specifically support your event business.

• Embed a 3D virtual tour alongside your photos and 2D layouts to add a new level of depth.  

4. Your website is not search engine optimized for your event business

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), your marketing strategy has probably, understandably, focused on the ‘hotelish’ parts of your hotel. But you also need to optimize your site to show up in search engine result pages (SERPs) when people come looking for event venues, rather than hotels.  

If you expect to show up organically and compete on paid search, you need Google to believe that your hotel marketing has something substantial to say about events, too. According to Google, everything from the structure of the site to the content, to the URLs for your pages, images, alt text, and advertisements should all be working in harmony and supporting the idea that, yes, this site is also about events!

While many people may find their venue through third-party sites and word of mouth, search engines remain an important part of any event venue marketing strategy, especially if you compete around local search. Nearly half (46%) of all searches on Google are location-based.  

So, while it may be really difficult to show up when people search for “conference venue,” you may show up when people search “(your city) conference venue.” This is especially important for out-of-town prospects, whose own generic searches will turn up locations near them, forcing them to include location names in their searches.  

Tips for improvement:

• Use a free keyword research tool like WordStream to discover and plan out your keywords for the best organic reach

• Use a paid keyword and SEO analytics tool like Moz to see how you compare to the competition and refine your strategy to improve your SERP rankings

• Include locales in your keywords to capture high intent-based searches

• Create and update your Google Business Profile to improve local search results

5. There are browser and mobile version compatibility issues

How your prospects engage with your hotel’s site has changed dramatically over the past few years. If your marketing isn’t compatible with mobile phones and different browsers, there are probably significant user experience issues that are impacting your events business.

First, perhaps the biggest trend you need to consider is how much mobile has overtaken desktop usage. In 2020, mobile usage outpaced desktops by 81%; by 2023, that gap had grown to 313%. Mobile visitors look at fewer pages and are more likely to bounce early, making the first impression critical for your smartphone-scrolling customers.  

If your website isn’t using Responsive Web Design to resize, hide, shrink, or enlarge elements of your site to make it usable (and pretty) across any type of device, or a dedicated mobile app even, it’s likely that your prospects are missing out on key marketing experiences.  

When your website creates poor user experiences and high bounce rates due to mobile-device compatibility or cross-browser compatibility issues, it is a strong signal to search engines that your site is not authoritative or trustworthy, sinking your SEO marketing efforts.  

Tips for improvement:

• Explore your site for yourself on different devices to understand the user experience of your customers

• Use tools like Lighthouse to test mobile and browser compatibility  

• Fix outdated and incompatible code that’s hurting your site’s performance across different browsers and devices

Stand out from the competition with 3D virtual tours of your event spaces

Hotel marketers have a tough job. Needing to know about everything from JavaScript to the best Java to serve at open house events requires a broad skillset across the team. One way to help yourself and your team out is to add a 3D virtual tour of your event venue spaces to the website.  

A 3D virtual tour is the best tool marketers have to give prospects the experience of a space, short of hopping in a car or on a plane and showing up in person. With Prismm, you can create custom virtual catalogs to showcase layouts for different types of events. And, everything is visualized in photorealistic detail, which is going to help more people be willing to pick up the phone or fill out a form.  

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