Social Media
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: 4 Ways to Generate More Business Travel Leads
Generating leads is an ongoing task for any hotel marketer. Social media is a great way to reach out to prospective clients and LinkedIn is especially useful for those hotels looking to increase their business travel reservations. Having recently undergone a substantial redesign, LinkedIn is an ideal network for hotel marketers who want to access a professional audience in order to amplify their business client base.
Try these four ways to generate more business travel leads using your existing LinkedIn profile, specialist LinkedIn marketing solutions and your hotel’s business page.
LinkedIn Marketing Solution 1: Build an audience
Making connections on LinkedIn is vital for widening your audience and building your brand. First of all, add your connections. Avoid sending out lots of connection requests to people you have never met or interacted with. This is considered poor etiquette and will annoy those users, so stick to people you actually know initially. You’ll soon find that as you become more active on both your own profile and on your hotel’s LinkedIn page, connection requests will trickle in. Be sure to connect with your current clients and invite previous business travellers to join you.
LinkedIn Marketing Solution 2: Get involved
Being a business travel expert means you can offer a wealth of useful information. Share this by joining relevant groups and participating in relevant discussions. Share information that sets you up as an expert in your field without always relying on the hard sell. Most hotel marketing company social media experts will advocate for a 20/80 split. Focus on being helpful. Offer advice on locations or legalities, recommendations for useful services or other tips that will set business travellers up for success. The golden rule of updates is focus on adding value rather than constantly pushing offers. In a group situation, comment where you can genuinely be helpful but don’t leap into every conversation with a link back to your booking engine.
LinkedIn Marketing Solution 3: Recommendations
Whenever LinkedIn suggests posting a recommendation most people sigh and click away. It actually only takes 5 minutes of your time to support a customer or key contact by giving a recommendation and you can use this to your advantage. This serves three purposes, it sets you up as a valuable connection, it shows that you understand networking and indicating the value of people you interact with, and of course, there is the reciprocation potential for them to return the favour. Consider (genuine) recommendations an investment in a future recommendation for your own expertise.
LinkedIn Marketing Solution 4: The Direct Sell
Have you sold your facilities and your business travel expertise on your LinkedIn profile? This is the perfect place for direct promotion so use it well. What do you do and why do you do it? What is the motivation that drives you as a hotel marketer (Hint: The answer is of course to provide the perfect travel solution for the busy clients that you value so much). You can also mention any accolades you have received, but do not go overboard. Stick to about a paragraph that answers the three Ws. Who are you; What do you do; and Why should people choose to do business with you?