A recent survey conducted by HeBS on Hotel Internet Marketing identifies significant online marketing trends in the hospitality industry.  The survey polled hotel general managers, e-commerce managers, sales and marketing directors and hotel revenue managers to discover trends in online marketing priorities and strategies among hoteliers for 2009.  Here is a short summary of the responses:

• Internet marketing was voted most important over traditional marketing or even a mix of both.
• 63% of hoteliers said they planned to increase their online marketing budget in 2009 despite the economic situation. (Many were raising this budget over 15%).
• 81.6% of hoteliers voted that website optimization was a top priority—producing the best ROIs. In this economy, optimization is the most cost-effective and results-producing online marketing initiative of 2009.
• In 2009 the survey shows that hoteliers will spend 13.3% of their Internet marketing budget on website optimization, 15.7% on PPC/ SEM, 7.6% on strategic linking and 20.6% on website re-design.
  24.4% of hoteliers said that they are planning to advertize on social media sites in the next year.

Is your hotel considering how to maximize your online marketing budget to reach the most possible consumers in 2009? According to the survey by HeBS, industry data proves that the majority of hotel business comes directly from the “online channel.” The growing importance of online business to the hotel industry is one of the reasons why search engine optimization, or SEO is rising to top priority in hotel marketing budgets.  The SEO process involves integrating the best, relevant keywords, meta data, image text, etc. into a website to make it rank high in the search engines and to bring traffic to the site which in turn will bring increased revenue to the business.  To learn more about how 10Best Solutions can assist with your online marketing needs, please visit us at 10BestSolutions.com.