Millennials are the generation of mobile. With 90% of the millennial generation having a mobile phone, it’s no real surprise that your hotel website being mobile friendly is crucial. Not only does your site need to be mobile compatible, but it needs to be beautifully designed, user friendly, and show relevant content for this generation. Surveys suggest that this group is not always thrilled by the mobile experience that they receive from businesses. Millennials expect, and even demand that your business be accessible by mobile, and if it isn’t, they will leave.
Here are some vital features your website needs to keep this generation engaged and wanting to do more business with your organization:
- Design for the mobile first experience – make sure to design your website with mobile experience as the primary consideration. When designing your responsive website, keep the “thumb zone” in mind – users hold their phones in different ways. By keeping that in mind while designing, you will improve the mobile user experience.
- Make sure your website is mobile search compatible – mobile search rate has already surpassed desktop search in 2015. By marking up your web content with schemas and geo-tags, your mobile search traffic will be ready for the next generation search.
- Focus content marketing strategy on things to do in the area and destination experience – Millennials are destination and experience driven when choosing a hotel. By having local event and attraction information on your website, you emulate the offline business drivers in the online world. Your hotel stays relevant and offers the content that Millennials want to see.
- Personalization and relevance is critical – by providing an experience tailored to the user and location, you increase the relevance of content and build customer loyalty
With the millennial generation having greater impact on the travel industry, hoteliers need to tune their website design, structure, and strategy to cater to this digitally savvy market. According to USA Today, 86% of the millennial generation feels that there are still a lot of websites without good mobile functionality. Is your website ready for mobile search and the millennial generation?
To learn more about “Mobile and Millennials – Is Your Website Ready?,” attend Milestone’s Digital Marketing Conference in Santa Clara, CA September 14th-15th. For more information about this conference, please click Milestone Digital Marketing Conference.
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Contributed by Lauren Adams, Product Marketing Specialist
