How to Leverage Summer Events to Generate Traffic and Revenue for Your Hotel

As summer approaches there are a lot of great city events that bring locals and visitors together at a specific time. Those attending big summer events, festivals, and concerts are usually looking for a place to stay, and we want to make it easy for them to find your hotel. Event marketing is a great opportunity for hotels to leverage their websites and social media profiles to promote their property and target a specific group of event-goers. Below are a few tips on how to best target and promote popular local events for your hotel:

1. Pre-event: Create a cross-channel marketing campaign for the event

• Learn about it: Google Insights is a great place to go to see when an event is gaining more popularity in search. If it is an event that occurs yearly, you can see when the search volume started to increase in previous years so you know when to begin marketing for that event.
  
• Create an offer: Who doesn’t like a good deal? If you add a special offer specific to those event goers it gives them more incentive to stay at your property versus a competitor. Add it to your website, your Google Places account, send out an email marketing campaign and post about it on social channels to get the word out to those attending.
• Talk about it: Once you know what to talk about, and when to start talking about it, start creating buzz. Create a blog post about the event and the special you may be offering, find the event’s Facebook page (most of them have their own social pages) and tag that page in your post so its followers have access to your page as well. Link back to the special on your website in the post so followers can see you are offering a special deal.
• Get a link: a lot of events and festivals have their own websites, and some of them will add a link to your website if you are offering a deal they feel is valuable to their audience. Reach out to the event contact and see if you can get your special added to their event website and a link back to your website.
  

2. Post-event

• Create post event buzz: take pictures and videos at the event and post them to your blog and social channels to create additional buzz after the event. Let people know they are free to share your images and videos so they are promoted and passed on by others as well.
• Leave a review: tweet or post about your experience and thoughts about the event and include mentions and tags of speakers or event profiles to increase your reach. Write a review about the event on your blog and link to it via your social channels and website so visitors can see photos and read about your experience.
• Get others’ opinions: get your guests to post photos and talk about what they enjoyed most about the event
• Plan for next year!

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Contributed by Meagan Hasenoehrl, Sr. eStrategist