AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Teacher Resource 12.1
Presentation Notes: Internet Marketing BasicsBefore you show this presentation, use the text accompanying each slide to develop presentation notes. Writing the notes yourself enables you to approach the subject matter in a way that is comfortable to you and engaging for your students. Make this presentation as interactive as possible by stopping frequently to ask questions and encourage class discussion.
Today, we are going to learn about some of the latest trends in using the Internet to market a hospitality business. Keep in mind that Internet marketing is constantly changing. By the time you finish this lesson, someone will probably have come up with a new way to use the Internet to promote his or her business or product. But this presentation will explain some of the basics of how Internet marketing works.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Today, almost every business has a website. Even if you run a business out of your home, you can put up a simple website using a predesigned template. If you have a larger business or you know your target market spends a lot of time on the Internet, you can hire a professional website designer to build a custom website that includes exactly the features you want.
If you were checking out a new restaurant, you would expect to be able to find the restaurant’s hours or directions for how to get to the restaurant on its website. You would probably see photographs of what the restaurant looks like, and possibly a sample menu. So let’s take a look at some of the components of a website.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
If you look at a typical web address, it usually has three parts:
• First there’s the “www,” which stands for “World Wide Web.”
• Next there is the unique part of the domain name. This is usually based on the company’s name.
• Finally, there is the suffix, the three or more letters after the period. These are designed to tell a visitor something about the website he or she is visiting. For example, “.com” means it is a commercial website (it represents a business). Other common suffixes include “.edu” (usually used by colleges or universities), “.org” (used by organizations like nonprofits, museums, or national parks), and “.net,” which is another common suffix. New suffixes are becoming more common, too. For example, the San Francisco Travel Association website is www.sanfrancisco.travel.
When you type in a domain name, you’re telling the computer which website you want to go to. You can register a specific domain name, which means that it belongs to you. For example, you can’t buy “starbucks.com”—that already belongs to somebody else.
You want your domain name to be easy to remember and appropriate for your business. But you also don’t want it to be too long or complicated. So if you think of the example project, www.FarmHouse.com might work, but www.FarmHouseFamilyRetreatinSantaRosa.com is too long and complicated.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
If you visit a basic website, the first thing you will probably see is the home page.
Have you ever watched the news on TV? When the news first starts, they show you a “tease.” That means they show you a brief clip or tell you a little bit about the news stories they will show during that newscast. They don’t tell you the whole story about the building that burned down or the person who got shot—they just give you a little bit of information and tell you to stay tuned. A good home page works in a similar way: it gives someone a little bit of information and then says, “If you want more information about our restaurant’s menu, click here.”
The tease on a home page isn’t just about the words. It’s also about the visuals—photographs, videos, colors, and more—on the page. Your home page has to send the right message about your product to encourage people to keep looking.
Think about the example project attraction. The FarmHouse is supposed to be a family-friendly place. Now imagine a mom goes to their website to check it out. If the home page is all dark colors and pictures of people with tattoos and lots of piercings and a music video is playing on the home page that has lots of swearing in it, do you think an average mom is going to keep looking at that resort for a trip with her kids? Probably not. Those images and sounds don’t fit the product or the target market.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Here is an example of a home page.
At the top of the page is the title. In this example, the title says “your logo” because this is a website template, so it doesn’t have any real information in it yet.
Below the title, you can see some buttons. Most home pages have buttons or links that help a visitor go to other parts of the site. For example, if you were visiting a restaurant’s website, it might have one page that showed its menu, one page that had photos of the restaurant, and one page that talked about its banquet room where it hosts special events. If you use a template to build your own website, one thing you would have to do is figure out what information you want to put on each page.
Other common features of a basic website may include a search box, which helps visitors find information on the site; a log-in page, for sites that “remember” visitors or sites where visitors have an account; and contact information for how visitors can email or call the business.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Internet marketing is very important, but all of your marketing channels need to work together to create a unified marketing campaign.
Of course your website needs to link to social media, with buttons for visitors to click that bring them to your FaceBook page, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and any other social media that is important for your product. The site also needs to link to help buttons and ways to contact actual people.
You can use your website to share your other marketing materials with potential customers or the media. You can put your print materials—a menu, a brochure, and so on—on your website for people to download onto their own computers. You could post your TV commercial or radio commercial on the website for people to see/hear. And some companies post their press releases or press kits on their website so that reporters and customers can learn more about the business. Many times firms will actually use their print or television advertisements to direct viewers to their website. To see such examples, watch Super Bowl ads from the last several years, which you can usually find online.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Some websites only exist for e-commerce—sites like Amazon.com, which just sells stuff. But many business websites incorporate an e-commerce component. For example, if you go to the website for Sports Illustrated or any magazine, you will see that most of the website has articles and photos from the magazine. But it will also have a way for you to subscribe to the magazine and let you pay for your subscription online. If you go to a hotel’s website, it will probably give you the option to make reservations at the hotel, either by providing a phone number of the option “click here.” If you go to a website of a city or tourist destination, you can easily buy logoed merchandise.
Adding e-commerce to your website is a good idea, but it can be complicated. If people are buying things on your website, they will be giving you their personal information—their names, their credit card numbers, and so on. So your website needs to be secure, designed in a way to prevent people from stealing that information.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing help people to find the information they need on the Internet. If you do a search for a common term, the search engine will bring you thousands or even millions of results. You want your company’s name to show up at the top of those results. Search engine marketing (SEM) helps you do that.
There are two ways to get your company’s name higher in the results. You can pay for your results to show up at the top of the results, where they will appear in an advertising section of the page or on the side. Or you can use search engine optimization (SEO) to use the design and content on your site to move higher in the results list. SEO is one element of SEM, which also includes pay-per-click listings and advertisements, for example.
Have you ever used a search engine and noticed a box at the top of your results? In the image above, there’s a yellow box at the top of the results. That is usually labeled “sponsored result” or “sponsored content.” That means that the result is showing up at the top of the page because the company paid for it to be there.
But what if you don’t have the money to pay for your result to show up at the top of the list? You might use SEO instead.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Imagine you did an online search for “Pizza Hut.” The search engine is going to look for websites that use those two words. Those are the key words the search engine is looking for. A key word is the specific term you ask a search engine to find.
For example, let’s say you want to know which country won the World Cup in 2014. You can type “Who won the World Cup in 2014?” or even just type in the key words “world cup winner 2014.”
Because a search engine focuses on key words, if your website includes those key words, it will show up in the search engine’s results. If the website has those words in its domain name or it uses those terms a lot on the site, it will be higher in the results. You are more likely to click on that site if you see it on the first page of results. That’s what getting more traffic to your site means: more people view it.
But it’s not as simple as just writing “Pizza Hut” 20 times across the top of the site. SEO is also part of how the site is constructed and how parts of the site are labeled. SEO experts go through specialized training about how to get a website to rank higher in search results. Some people make an entire career out of SEO and SEM, because major companies frequently use both.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Okay, so you built a great website. You hired someone to help you with your e-commerce, and maybe you hired an expert in SEM to make sure your site shows up at the top of the search results. Now what?
Well, having a good website is only part of Internet marketing. You can also use email, ads, and content on other websites to promote your business.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
You can pay to put ads on other websites. Banner ads are sometimes effective. A banner ad is a large ad that stretches across the top of a website and it functions like an Internet billboard. You can click on the ad and it will open in a new web page. It is big and it catches a potential customer’s attention, but it is only enough space for some basic information and images. You can also run other, smaller ads on websites, which would probably look something like your print ads.
You need to choose which websites you want your banner ad to be on based on what your target market is. This is called targeted advertising. For example, if you are trying to attract teenagers, putting an ad on CNN.com probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But CNN.com could be a perfect place if you’re trying to attract businesspeople. If your attraction will appeal to honeymooners, you might want to advertise on wedding planning websites like TheKnot.com or WeddingChannel.com.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Pay-per-click advertising is another component of SEM. With pay per click, you don’t pay a lot of money to post the ad on a website. Instead, you pay a small amount (for example, 10 cents) every time a person clicks on your ad. How much you pay depends on what site you’re advertising on and what key word or topic your ad is connected to.
Many search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, offer pay-per-click advertising services. Some companies also have affiliate websites. That means a big company might put an ad on a small site—for example, an author who writes books might be an affiliate of Amazon.com. So if you visit the author’s website, you might see an ad for Amazon. It’s a pay-per-click ad, so if you click on it, the owner of the website will make money. This is another way to drive traffic to the main website.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
In addition to your own website, you can share content and advertising for other websites. In the hospitality industry, many businesses cooperate with a tourism board or other local group that promotes tourism. For example, if you are planning a trip to Hawaii, two of the top search engine results are GoHawaii.com and Hawaii.com. GoHawaii is a website sponsored by the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau. Hawaii.com is a website run by a media company that owns the biggest paper in the state. Both of these websites include ads and information provided by local tourism businesses, which is called sponsored content or sponsored results.
This can be a great opportunity for smaller or less-well-known businesses. A traveler planning to go to Hawaii may not know the name of a small tour boat operator, but if that traveler visits one of these major sites (which come up at the top of the search results), he or she may learn about the small tour boat operator and take a tour.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
It is easy to send an email out to many people at once, and it is much less expensive than sending out a lot of traditional mail. If you mail letters to people, you need to pay for paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, and so forth. You can also create an email newsletter, which can include more detailed information and, in many cases, photographs.
Email marketing requires you to have the email addresses of potential customers. Most websites collect these addresses through an opt-in process. That means that people have to choose to give you their address. You will frequently see things on websites that say, “Sign up here to get free coupons and notification of special deals.” If you sign up, you have opted in to receive emails from that site.
You need to be careful with email marketing. Even though people signed up to get notifications from you, if you send them too many unimportant emails, they will start to ignore what you send or mark your emails as spam. In addition, many countries have different rules and regulations regarding the sending of emails. All firms spend time with their legal department prior to contacting customers outside the United States.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Web analytics tracks website traffic, how many people visit your website, how long they spent time at the website, which zip code visitors live in, and which websites people visited before and after your website.
Traffic is measured in page views. Each time a person loads a single page on the Internet that counts as one page view. So each page of your website will have its own number of page views. Logically, your home page should have the most page views, since that’s the first page people see when they visit your website.
Another term people use is hits. When you click on a link or an image, you are sending a request—basically saying, “I’d like to see this, please.” That is a hit. A website’s popularity can be measured by its hits.
Web analytics can help you track all your marketing, both Internet and traditional. For example, let’s say you run a new radio ad that directs people to your website. You can use web analytics to track whether your website traffic is up after that commercial. Analytics can track how visible your website is on the Internet, and it can also track where people go once they get to your website. Imagine you run a restaurant. Your analytics might tell you that you’re getting a lot of page views for your home page but not that many on your menu page. If you want more people to see your menu, you might think about how to redesign your website so that more people are aware of the menu page.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Before social network sites like Facebook and YouTube, businesses could build a website, maintain it so that it stays current (for example, if your restaurant menu changes every week, you make sure the menu on your website does too), and that business would be on top of the latest marketing trend.
Now, a good website is crucial, but it isn’t enough, because technology is changing so fast. For example, people use their smartphone to access the Internet more and more. This change in the main method of viewing websites will have an effect on website design. People are also using phone apps to conduct e-commerce, which will change how we use the Internet for marketing. We will be learning about some of the new tools and applications that marketers need to know about in the next lesson.
Using the following criteria, assess whether students met each one.
Met Partially Met
Didn’t Meet
The assignment analyzes a website for a hospitality business that could plausibly be considered a competitor with the project attraction, an industry leader, or a trendsetter.
□ □ □
The assignment includes a detailed analysis about the website, focusing on its home page. □ □ □The assignment includes a logical and well-supported recommendation about Internet marketing for the project attraction.
□ □ □
The completed assignment is neat and uses proper spelling and grammar. □ □ □
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Teacher Resource 12.3
Key Vocabulary: Internet Marketing Basics
Term Definition
affiliate A subordinate or subsidiary associate; in Internet marketing, an affiliate website directs traffic to the main website. For example, an author’s website is an Amazon affiliate and directs people to Amazon.com to buy the author’s books. The author then gets a small amount of money as a part of that transaction.
banner ad An advertisement placed on a web page that acts as a link to an advertiser’s website; these ads frequently run along the top of the page like a banner.
domain name A string of letters and numbers (separated by periods) that is used to name organizations and computers and addresses on the Internet.
download To copy a file from another computer to one’s own, over a network or from the Internet.
e-commerce Electronic commerce, which is the buying and selling of products or services over the Internet or through a network.
email Electronic mail, sent via the Internet.
hit A request sent to a web server for access to a file, usually generated by a user clicking a link or an image. A website’s popularity is measured by how many such requests its users make.
home page The first page on a website, it usually welcomes guests and helps guide them to information on other parts of the site.
key word Word used by search engines to help users find the information they are seeking on the web.
opt-in An email marketing term in which the email recipient specifically requests receiving email related to a specific topic of interest.
page ranking A tool that determines the popularity of a website. A website’s popularity rating is based on the number of hits it receives in a certain time period; for example, hits per day, month, or year.
page view A request to load a single page of an Internet site.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Term Definition
pay-per-click advertising An advertising model used on websites in which advertisers pay the host only when the ad is clicked.
search engine A computer program that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information, and other types of files.
search engine marketing (SEM)
A form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages.
search engine optimization (SEO)
Changing the content or architecture of a site to increase its visibility in search engine result pages.
secure In the context of a website, this means it is designed with encryption and other security features to protect customer data.
spam Unwanted or junk email.
traffic The amount of activity over a communication system during a given period of time (for example, the number of visitors who view a specific website).
web analytics The measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
webmaster Person who designs and/or maintains a website.
website A collection of web content connected to a single home page; the multiple pages are all accessed with one web address.
World Wide Web Abbreviated “www,” and also called the web, it is a system of interlinked hypertext pages.
AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 12 Internet Marketing Basics
Teacher Resource 12.4
Bibliography: Internet Marketing BasicsThe following sources were used in the preparation of this lesson and may be useful for your reference or as classroom resources. We check and update the URLs annually to ensure that they continue to be useful.
PrintBowie, David, and Francis Buttle. Hospitality Marketing: An Introduction. Burlington, MA: Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004.
Hsu, Cathy H.C., and Tom Powers. Marketing Hospitality, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 2002.
Reid, Robert D., and David C. Bojanic. Hospitality Marketing Management, 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006.
Travis, Daryl. Emotional Branding. Roseville, CA: Prima Venture, 2000.
“Display Advertising.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_advertising (accessed January 18, 2016).
“Email Marketing.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_marketing (accessed January 18, 2016).
“Internet Marketing Topics.” KnowThis.com, http://www.knowthis.com/internet-marketing-tag (accessed January 18, 2016).
“Pay Per Click.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click (accessed January 18, 2016).
Rende, Nicole. “What’s the Difference Between SEO and SEM?” HubSpot Blogs, June 19, 2014, http://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/seo-sem-faqs (accessed January 18, 2016).
“Search Engine Marketing.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing (accessed January 18, 2016).
“Search Engine Optimization.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization (accessed January 18, 2016).
“Web Analytics.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics (accessed January 18, 2016).
