Google Confirms: Google Posts Usability Extended To Hotels

By Keith Brophy, Senior Director of Hospitality Customer Success at Milestone Inc. LinkedIn

While competing in the local market, covering all possible touch points to engage with customers is essential to edge out your competition, and Google Posts is a great way to do just that. Businesses that have a Google My Business Profile can use Google Posts to engage with their customers if they have something new to announce, if their product or service is on offer or if they have an upcoming event. This short post when published is displayed on the Knowledge Panel of the business and could prove to be the door to your business for new and potential customers.

While this benefit has eluded the hospitality industry. However, over the last month, our Milestone Team noticed that the functionality to carry out posts was available (on the GMB Backend screen) for hotels as the posts tab was displayed for this excluded industry.

Having presumed it to be a bug, we played the wait and watch game. Sure enough, Google confirmed that they have indeed extended Google Posts to the Hotel Industry – they even drafted guidelines on their Help Document.

For what can hotels use the Google Posts functionality?

Google has predominately extended the use of this feature to hotels to bridge the communication gap with customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, hotels can now use this feature for any notices or communications regarding their business during the pandemic. Hotels can also use the feature to describe ‘What’s New’ (of their services) to customers and post upcoming events using the ‘Event’ option.

Limitation of Google Posts for Hotels – No ‘Offer’ Posts

Hotels can’t use Google Posts for promotional purposes and as a result, the ‘Offer’ option that’s available for other industries will not be extended to hotels. The reasoning being that Google already displays the price of the hotel and that of OTAs and if there are deals or promotions, and having another ‘price-related’ section on the Knowledge Panel of the business could be a cause for price discrepancy and confusion for customers.

Do Google Posts drive engagement and revenue for businesses?

Yes, absolutely. Not only does Google Posts drive the Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T) signals for your business and have proved to improve map rankings as well, they do drive engagement and revenue for businesses. We carried out a study to see if Google Posts actually drive engagement and revenue for businesses and while the numbers were dwarfed by direct bookings on the website from GMB profile clicks, the engagement and revenue numbers of the business through Google Posts were significant as you can see in the image below.

Like we said, it is important to cover all possible touchpoints to edge out your competition, and utilizing Google Posts is your ticket and another measure to drive engagement and revenue.

Streamlining the Google Posts workflow with Milestone Local

Having to create and publish Google Posts for each GMB location independently could certainly prove an arduous task, and that’s where a platform like Milestone Local comes in to make it a minute’s work. You read that correctly, using Milestone Local, you just have to create one post and you can publish it across all or select locations in one go. Saving you the time to replicate and publish the post for each location. Choose your post type, schedule a post, or preview and publish right away – Milestone Local has a seamless end-to-end workflow for Google Posts and you can also track the engagement and revenue this functionality is driving.

To know more about Milestone Local or our suite of products that will help you drive your engagement on search and revenue, contact us at sales@milestoneinternet.com or call us at 408-200-2211.

Source:
https://support.google.com/business/answer/7213077?hl=en
https://support.google.com/business/answer/9177814?hl=en