Market Sweeping on the Net is a Cost-effective Marketing
tool for the Hotel industry©
I wrote this short paper in 2011. While it applies to the Hospitality sector, the basic rules apply to any activity that you are trying to promote on-line. Use a small number of Social Media Tools, and use them well, if you have a generic website for your work, make sure to place a link on every Social Media post back to your generic website. Sometimes it is tempting to Follow people just for the sake of Following them, however, each Follow should be carefully considered.
If you Follow inactive Social Media sites, then this will affect your overall ranking on Google, if you Follow Social Media sites that are simply Spam, this will also damage your overall ranking. I check Social Media sites for people all the time, and while they have jealously protected their 5,000 Followers, it normally transpires that 50% and more are actually inactive or spam. This type of poor site management means that people who are trying to share an important message are in fact talking to themselves.
Organisations such as Sinn Fein/PIRA are controlling a lot of conversation online, however, people who engage with Sinn Fein/PIRA are seriously damaging their own overall ranking as Sinn Fein/PIRA sites are on a Watch List of Fraudsters. Sinn Fein/PIRA target sites that are active and who challenge their view of the world, they will target the Followers of such sites and try to get people to stop Following a certain site. Once you allow yourself to Follow instructions from Sinn Fein/PIRA this is picked up on an Algorithm and you are viewed as working under Sinn Fein/PIRA instruction and your listing is affected.
During the boom years of Ireland’s unprecedented economic
growth known as the years of the Celtic Tiger, traditional businesses were
collectively pushed into spending hundreds of millions of Euros on establishing
and developing websites for their businesses. Business executives signed off on
large sums of money to newly established IT businesses in order to have
websites established and developed. Business executives and boards of directors
were told they would be left behind if they did not throw vast sums of money at
establishing an e-Business aspect to their business.
In the aftermath of the boom years and now well into
recession much of that eBusiness investment has been exposed as a black hole.
Many companies have been left with nothing more than black holes in cyber
space; they do not have and cannot afford the staff necessary to ensure the
regular up dating, management and maintenance of their web sites. This dilemma
is not just typical of small and medium sized companies; a cursory browse of
the Internet will show that many large companies have websites best described
as white elephants. Clicking links on many business websites is like walking
through a cyber ghost estate.
Now businesses are being told that social networking sites
such as Facebook are the place to have their businesses sited, with ‘500
million’ members and a target for 1 Billion members by the end of 2011 Facebook
is certainly a place in which products and services can be marketed and sold,
however, Facebook is not the be all and end all of eBusiness and eCommerce.
This is not the time to spend tight budgets on salaries to IT companies to set
up and maintain a Facebook site for your company. Facebook is a free service
and with some in-house training or small consultancy investment, staff members
could be up skilled to deal with this aspect of your marketing strategy.
However, if you do insist on spending time and money on
establishing a Facebook site for your business, I would suggest that you get
value for your money. I have been trying a concept that I now call, Market
Sweeping on the Net, this concept involves establishing several accounts in the
name of your business, for example, an account for Facebook, Twitter, Blogger,
uTube and so forth. The type of accounts you establish will depend on your
business, for example, if you are a Hotelier it will not be possible for people
to book into your Hotel on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and so forth. If you are a
Hotelier, Market Sweeping on the Net, is ideal for you.
Market Sweeping on the Net does exactly what it says on the
tin, you use your various accounts to sweep the net in order to drive potential
customers to your generic website where they can book rooms, make restaurant
reservations, make inquiries and so forth. It is important to emphasise that
your business type will determine the type and number of accounts that you
should sign up for. You may ask what possible value a Twitter account can have
for your business as it only allows 140 characters per post; the fact is that
Twitter is a free service that allows you to put your brand name into a new
market place. If someone views the name of your Hotel on Twitter and you’re
presenting a special offer, that person is only a click away from your generic
site.
Facebook, Blogger, uTube and other services offer similar
opportunities for your business, however, it must be stressed that you need to
be certain that you will be able to manage and maintain these accounts once the
initial euphoria is over. Facebook is a worldwide social networking phenomena,
will Facebook be worth the time, energy and more importantly the money you will
inevitably spend, the answer can be found in the stats from your generic site,
if you’re not getting the hits can you justify the costs. Facebook, Blogger,
Twitter, uTube and other accounts will not present an overnight success story,
these accounts take time to build, potential customers will only visit your
generic site if it is presented as interesting and worthwhile. You have to ask
yourself, why someone would want to visit your site rather than the hundreds of
millions of other sites available on the net. Your sites must be regularly up
dated, they must be interesting and they must have Keyword Research at their
heart. You must have good quality links both to and from your generic site.
Keyword Research is not science; if you’re in the Hotel
business then your posts must contain Keywords relating to your business, both
the pages on your generic web site and your regular postings must contain
Keywords that will be picked up by the search engines. Search engine
optimisation is important in promoting your business on the net, again it is
not rocket science and don’t let anyone tell you that it is, keep your page and
post titles short and to the point, describe who you are, what you’re selling
and where are you selling it. For Example, ‘Central Hotel Dublin-rooms from
£59-Luxury you can afford’ (56 characters), you can say so much in so few
words. Make sure your tags are relevant to your site content.
Continuing with the Hotel industry, Market Sweeping on the
Net, is ideal, you use every opportunity possible to sweep the net and draw
potential customers to your generic site where they can view your range of
products, services and offers. In my own experiments with Market Sweeping on
the Net I have found that an increase of up to 30% potential customers can be
drawn to my generic sites, a 30% increase in potential customers is very
significant in the new economic dispensation. Businesses can no longer afford
to spend money on worthlessness and uselessness, every Euro spent must show a
return. If applied correctly Market Sweeping on the Net could bring significant
new numbers of potential customers to your generic site.
