My favorite digital marketing tools I regularly use to manage marketing for hotels

In the past 10 years of experience as a hotel marketing consultant, I’ve learned that any strategy is only as good as the data and information we have. That’s why it’s important to have proper analytics and business intelligence at hand. In this post, I’d like to share the top tools that I use to manage hotel marketing, along with some best practices that have helped me and my clients to achieve stellar success.

1. GuestRadar: GuestRadar is a 360 hotel market intelligence tool that provides destination-specific insights. While there is a free version available, I use the full version which shows predictive data about travel budget, demand, booking preferences, demographics, and more by each market that I subscribe to. GuestRadar is an invaluable tool for monitoring inbound travel trends to a specific destination, making it easier to create targeted marketing campaigns.
2. Google Analytics 4 (GA4): GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics, and it’s the tool I use to check our market penetration compared to the data we see in GuestRadar. It allows me to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions and provides insights into where we need to improve.
3. OTA Insight: To monitor OTA (Online Travel Agency) performance, OTA Insight is a fantastic tool to have. It shows demand, pricing, rate-shopping insights, and more. With OTA Insight, we can make informed decisions about pricing and promotions, optimize our revenue management, and stay ahead of the competition.
4. Hootsuite: Social media is a crucial part of hotel marketing, and Hootsuite is my go-to tool for managing multiple social media channels. It allows me to schedule posts, monitor conversations, track metrics, and collaborate with team members, making social media management easier and more efficient.
5. Roivenue: Roivenue uses AI attribution to drive revenue growth and increase profits, ensuring that our marketing budgets are allocated properly where it gets the most return. With Roivenue, we can see which channels are performing best, optimize our marketing campaigns, and achieve better ROI.
6. SEMrush: SEMrush is a great tool for researching keywords and monitoring SEO performance. It allows me to see how our website ranks for specific keywords, monitor backlinks and analyze competitor data. By using this tool, we can optimize our website’s content and improve our search engine rankings.
7. Ahrefs: Ahrefs provides comprehensive backlink analysis, keyword research, and competitor analysis. With Ahrefs, we can see which pages are driving the most traffic to our website, which keywords our competitors are targeting, and how we can improve our website’s overall performance.
8. Hotjar: User experience is a critical component of hotel marketing, and Hotjar is a fantastic tool for analyzing user behavior on our website. With Hotjar, we can see where users are clicking, how far they’re scrolling, and where they’re dropping off. This helps us identify areas where we can improve the user experience and optimize our website for better conversions.
9. Sprout Social: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social is a social media management tool that allows us to monitor and manage multiple social media channels. One unique feature of Sprout Social is its social listening capabilities, which allow us to monitor conversations about our brand on social media and respond to customer feedback in real-time.
10. Canva: Canva is a fantastic tool for creating high-quality graphics and images. With Canva, we can create engaging social media posts, email newsletters, and other marketing collateral that help us stand out from the competition.

By using a combination of these tools, we’re able to gather and analyze data from a variety of sources and optimize all aspects of digital marketing setups.