Marketing for Your Travel Hostel Business
In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a visionary that wants to provide a service to the community through the great American past time, baseball. He believes that building a baseball field on his farm, will attract people from a far to come, see and play in baseball games. The mantra to see his vision through is, “If you build it, they will come.”
In the case of the hostel business, the mantra must be changed to, “If you build the marketing strategies, they will come.”
The three ways marketing a hostel business can be categorized are traditional, non-traditional and most impactful. Below are the categories with examples in how to do the marketing of a hostel business:
- Traditional – Word of mouth, Networking with Local Tourist Areas, Flyers, Radio
- Non-Traditional – Website, Paid Advertising, Facebook Shares, Social Media Influencers, Podcasts
- Most Impact – Query Served Hostel Website (Google, Pinterest and the like will show the hostel website automatically)
Traditional and Non-Traditional categories of hostel marketing serve best for a quick grasp of the traveler’s attention. It helps it’s purpose in the initial growth for a hostel and will be discussed in this article. Beyond that, I want to focus on a Query Served Hostel Website to maximize the marketing of your hostel business.
The Types of Hostel Marketing
Query Served Hostel Website will be the most effective way to market your hostel business. The principle is that search engines will provide your hostel to the most amount of people for the effort placed in marketing.
It by far beats any other marketing strategies, both paid and unpaid. The caveat is, it does take time before search engines will start pushing your hostel marketing to people.
I want to cover Query Served Hostel Websites, but before I do, I will provide a brief of the types of hostel marketing.
- Traditional – This is what you would typically lean to get the word going for your hostel business. It provides the quickest way for awareness. Downsides are that it takes continual effort, which can be fine done in an enjoyably systematized way. Examples of these traditional methods are below.
- Word of Mouth – You tell your friends and family about the hostel. That can mean phoning them or passing the information along to travelers you may meet.
- Networking with Local Tourist Areas – A funnel system can be created here from other avenues that travelers would go to. For instance, partnering with a yoga retreat company to share your hostel business with their yoga-based travelers.
- Non-Traditional – Some of this can be mixed in with the traditional category. But here, you can become more integrated with the digital way of marketing.
- Social Media Events – Market by sharing on social media posts. This can include fun activities and events that may be going on at your hostel.
- Paid Advertising – Facebook Ads and the like can also be away to get the word out for your hostel business. This will cost money. Plan for a budget.
- Social Media Influencers – People who have a travel niche for their Instagram or Youtube can be a good way to promote your hostel. In exchange, your hostel business will have to account for perks, such as free accommodation.
- Most Impact – This is bar none, the best way to market your hostel business. For the effort, a Query Served Hostel Website will provide the most awareness to the most amount of people.
- Query Served Hostel Websites – This will be the focus for the rest of the article. The mechanics of it will become more intricate, but the examples I will use takes Google (used by everybody in the world) to show your website to these masses potentially, and here’s how.
“If You Build It, They Will Come”
Traditional, Non-Traditional, and Most Impact are all crucial categories and have a place for a total marketing strategy for your hostel.
A good way to start promoting your hostel business is through the traditional and non-traditional categories. This will attract people to your business much quicker than the Query Served Hostel Website technique. It is however, limited and requires more manual effort.
For the long strategy and most impact, your marketing strategy should focus on the Query Served Hostel Website. Because Google has already attracted billions of their website, your hostel business would need to cater to Google to show your hostel to the rest of the planet.
To make sense of the Query Served Hostel Website, let me ask: “If Google only attracted 1 Billion people, and your marketing catered to Google so that Google only brings hostel business attention to 0.005% of the people they’ve attracted, how many people is that?”
Chances are Google has attracted more than 1 Billion people. But to answer the above question, that’s 50,000 people. This is the power of the Query Served Hostel Website.
I’ve chosen to cater to Google because of it’s unique algorithm. Social Media searches have algorithms that require advertisement spending and end after the ad campaign is complete. In contrast, Google will serve your website to potential hostel travelers beyond any paid campaign marketing strategy. This is done through website relevancy by articles.
Like the visionary from Field of Dreams, if you build a Query Served Hostel Website, people from afar will come.
Technical Side of Google
The technical side of how to cater to Google’s algorithm is to provide relevant article content to your website.
The travelers’ searches determine these relevant articles are making. If the relevant content on your website matches the intent for these searches, Google will share your website with the potential traveler. Without paying for advertising. Indefinitely.
You can find what potential travelers are searching for if you begin typing a query that potential travelers may have for your hostel area. Once you write an article that best matches its intent, Google will share it with these travelers.
For instance, if you begin typing “hostels in ” Google will automatically suggest query intent. This is because other searchers have searched this query before.
An article that best matches that intent will be served by Google. If there are other articles that match these queries, you have to beat them by writing the best.
But when first starting out it is better to have articles that have queries with a high number of words as it will be easier to beat other articles shown for this.
For instance, the long tail of the query below will be more natural to beat.
Starting the Query Based Website
Before you can start creating articles for your website, you must first have a website to create articles for.
I will be going through a step by step process in how to do so in upcoming articles. Stay tuned.
Just know that Query Served Hostel Website is the most bang for your back, so start looking up search queries that are long-tail so your website can be catered to Google’s algorithm.
