We know how difficult it can be for a hotel to maintain a strong brand presence online. It’s hard enough ranking on page one for local search terms, let alone global ones. With tight paid search budgets and rising Cost Per Clicks (CPC), if you really want to thrive in a competitive digital environment you need to be deploying innovative data-driven campaigns.
Attracting global audiences brings with it new challenges – such as differences in culture, online browsing behaviours and language. Prior to creating a comprehensive digital strategy, there are a number of key considerations that you need to address. Before you delve into the world of internationalisation, we’ve suggested some simple bookkeeping to get you started:
- Identify your key audiences/traffic sources (i.e North Americas, Europe, Asia etc.)
- Determine the messaging you want each audience to receive – is your content suitable for the target market?
- Consider potential communication barriers; some countries forgo Google and Bing and instead use Baidu (in China) or Yandex (in Russia) – Research should indicate whether you need to explore the possibility of advertising on different search engines.
To make this process easier for you, Avvio’s digital experts have come together to outline their top tips when targeting an international audience. We advise implementing these into any upcoming strategies.
5 tips when chartering new territory:
1. Research
You can never do enough research and development (R&D) when it comes to assessing the opportunities available for differing markets. Google offers a great tool known as Google Market Finder which will help you identify new business opportunities using country specific insights. These insights can be a great starting point when evaluating market opportunities.
2. Create country specific landing pages
Google explains it best: ‘Going global is all about acting local’. Country specific landing pages for your paid campaigns offer a great opportunity to tailor content specific to your target audience. Your landing page content should be tailored to suit a particular demographic through content and imagery. Keyword research plays an important part in creating relevant content for the right audience. You should also consider using different imagery to suit a particular location. Local attractions, for example, can be a unique selling point. Mentioning how far you are from these attractions are great indicators of locality.
3. Translate your campaigns
As a Google Partner, Avvio can access tools such as Google Translate to translate your ads into local languages when there is a strong enough budget in place. Google also use linguists who will write ad copy that seeks to increase conversion. As well as this, our Booking engine caters for 11 different languages. By default, the Avvio Booking Engine is available in English, but we also support the following additional languages:
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Spanish
- English
- Polish
- Czech
- Slovakian
Our AI-powered booking engine Allora uses a recommender engine which identifies the most appropriate language to display based on the country of a visitor. It can also detect user preference based on browser configuration.
4. On-site optimisation
The digital team specialise in onsite optimisation in the international market. Optimising your site from an SEO perspective is not only limited to areas such as metadata but also incorporates looking at Hreflang. Remember to update translated content and landing pages, meta titles and meta descriptions as well as relevant ‘H tags’ where applicable.
5. Optimise Paid Campaigns
Paid advertising can be more competitive or expensive in other countries. We have a number of strategies which seek to tailor your campaigns:
- Bids can be customised to relevant time-zones to ensure optimal click-through rates.
- Audience lists can be added with bidding strategies and demographic targeting to ensure a fully optimised campaign
- Other paid channels such as social media can be created to target different locations.
- New features such as Dynamic Search ads can be used to compare the performance of translated vs non-translated campaigns.
- We are also able to compare different images and text to get a better insight into the market. With paid video, we have the opportunity to translate content or text.
The list is endless which is why your Avvio ECM is on-board to put an internationalisation strategy in place for you.
Remember: personalised content is key when trying to connect with an international audience and when it comes to building a seamless browsing experience, few things are as powerful as delivering the right message at the right time. This has to extend beyond just getting visitors to your site, but right through the booking journey.
Our powerful booking engine Allora uses artificial intelligence which uses a proprietary Recommender Engine that delivers personalised and contextually relevant messaging, in real time. Allora improves the experience and outcome for every critical customer interaction to create a great guest experience from the start.
