Hotel Marketing
Marketers across all industries are faced with the challenge of keeping up with the constantly changing digital world. New technologies, social media and algorithm updates, as well as changes in PPC and SEO, can drastically alter your marketing strategy and its performance. Making it crucial to keep on top of the latest trends and new releases, which can affect your day to day activities. Recognising this challenge, the Big Bear team has collated a comprehensive list of changes in digital marketing that were announced in March. We hope these insights will provide marketers with the resources that could significantly influence their marketing activities and save precious time.
They are very basic websites, populated with the information displayed on the user’s Business Profile.
Google has announced that ‘’In March 2024, websites made with Google Business Profiles will be turned off and customers visiting your site will be redirected to your Business Profile instead. We recommend that you update your Google Business Profile to point to a new website.”
Previously mentioned redirects will only be active until the 10th of June, 2024. This change can affect businesses that previously relied on these simple websites to uphold some sort of digital presence. With Google removing this feature altogether, founders who don’t currently have a website in place are urged to invest in one that will showcase the essence of your business and will capture the attention of visitors coming from your Google Business Profile.
YouTube Shorts have been directly competing with TikTok for a while now. However, YouTube introducing this feature into their platform enabling split-screen duets, proposes a strong challenge to the currently most popular short-format platform - TikTok.
With the new Collab feature, YouTube creators can now record their short videos alongside a video of their choice, with their response being up to 60 seconds long. This brand new addition has the potential to significantly boost engagement on YouTube shorts, due to creators and businesses now having the opportunity to express themselves and directly respond to others through video. This fosters a sense of direct communication within the community.
On top of that, the new feature provides options for various side-by-side layouts, an ability to add pictures, and even green screen effects, which have become popular on TikTok. The addition of these creative video editing options provides brands and businesses with even more interactive ways to present their products and services to their target audiences.
Instagram is further enhancing the Creator Marketplace feature, which is meant to provide an easy way for brands to find relevant creators to collaborate with. The photo, and now video app is doing so by choosing to invite creators and brands based in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India and Brazil to join Creator Marketplace in the very near future.
The Creator Marketplace uses Instagram’s data to create tailored recommendations for brands. This makes it easier for brands and businesses to find creators that resonate with their content and audiences, providing a better fit for marketing campaigns and ads. Brands can also apply filters for both the creator and their audience attributes, which helps businesses, luxury hotels included, make more researched decisions when it comes to influencer marketing.
Gemini - Google’s AI model, will help marketers using PMax campaigns write longer headlines, as well as a feature of site link generation, which is also included in Google’s future release plans.
When it comes to visual assets, Google is updating its AI image generation models to Imagen 2. This new update will allow marketers to create various images of lifestyle scenarios related to their products and services. On top of that, with the Imagen 2 update, Google’s image editing makes it easier to edit and add new backgrounds to pictures, including AI-generated people. Imagen 2 also allows marketers to combine and make variations of pre-existing top-performing visuals, possibly further improving the effectiveness of your ad. All in all, leveraging these updates can save marketers precious time when looking for and creating visual ad assets, as well as diversify and boost the effectiveness of overall visuals used in your Pmax campaigns.
A new carousel-type result has been announced by Google. This type of result will be used to showcase events, products, businesses and brands in a carousel list, which can be scrolled through, similar to Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn carousel posts.
Carousel results like this offer a great way to showcase lists, making it perfect for the hospitality industry, which could benefit from appearing in carousel results of such queries as hotel stays in England (or any other location) or top restaurants in the city. This recently announced feature is currently in its beta-testing phase, meaning that you are not likely to spot it on your Google search results yet, but it is definitely something that marketers should keep an eye out for.
Google has recently been testing an AI tool, specifically designed to find and rewrite quality content. Although AI tools like this can bring great time-saving benefits to marketing teams, their ethical side is questionable. Such AI-based copywriting tools often raise plagiarism concerns, due to them simply rewording articles written by other authors, who put in the time to research and understand the topics they are covering. So it’s no surprise that many copywriters and marketers see Google introducing such AI-based copywriting tools as undermining their craft and the overall value of high-quality content, due to them encouraging unoriginal content.
The new Google Ads reporting tool is called ‘’Solutions’’ and it is completely free to use. Google launched this addition to the Google Ads toolkit as a way to simplify the performance reporting process for advertisers and marketers. ‘’Solutions’’ allow for an overall simpler and quicker way to manage and review your campaigns, budgets and performance. Aside from the great time-saving benefits, ‘’Solutions’’ also makes it easy to customise your reports, making them more tailored to your business goals and needs. Such personalised features include:
Although Google already offers easy-to-use reporting tools, having a dedicated reporting tool for Google Ads makes analysing the data a much more user-friendly and easier process.
March was a busy month for marketers, with many Google AI-related changes and new social media features to keep up with. To make it easier for marketers and businesses to keep up with these regular digital marketing changes, we collate a monthly list of marketing news, focussed across a spectrum of technological advancements, social media changes, as well as news in the world of SEO and PPC, that are valuable to know.
