Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to stay at a few different hotel locations. Many of them had their gyms, pools and spas. While at the Marriott Newport in Rhode Island this past weekend, I started to think about how the way hotels present and advertise their gyms and spa areas are a lot like how marketers promote and generate leads through online landing pages.
Hotel Gyms and Landing Pages Sell Dreams
When was the last time you went looking for a hotel online. There is a very good chance that you went through picture galleries of their hotel and the various areas they may offer, which includes the gym and pool area. Most people will look at these pictures and see the gym and say to themselves, “Wow, that’s a nice gym, I think I’ll work out while I’m there“… but in the end we know 99% of the people at the hotel will never use the gym.
This is exactly what I saw an experienced while at the gym in the Marriott Newport, and this was a really high quality gym! Inside they had around 20-30 different machines and all of them are high end Precor machines. Definitely a $100,000+ investment alone.
Now what’s the return on investment for this gym area? Very hard to tell… but still, it’s all about selling the dream (experience) and adding it as one of the benefits to staying at their high end hotel.
Take this same concept and apply it to any landing page and how marketers are selling the dream of weight loss, dating or any other service or product out there. How many products and services that are actually bought through landing pages are actually used by the customer… probably not too many… it’s about selling the experience and dream, not the end product.
Visualization is Everything
As mentioned earlier, the majority of hotels are now booked through online web sites and having a photo gallery to demonstrate the best features of a hotel or destination is everything. Just like a hotel puts a lot of money and work into their gym area setups and experience, marketers and designers are busy working on their landing page call to actions and trying to display the benefits of their service or product in the few seconds they have.
Just like you wouldn’t want to promote a quality product or service that you believe in with a unappealing or cheap looking landing page, hotels aren’t going to want to post pictures of old exercise machines and scummy looking work out rooms. In the end, no matter if you are promotion a weight loss offer or something as simplistic as a gym at a hotel, it all comes down to selling the experience and quality of that experience.
This is especially true with online website site and travel resource guides as well. Go to book hotels (??? ?????) and you will see than many different sites throughout the world have different call to actions and AI-based pricing that updates based off how many people are actually staying in the hotel.
Learning from Marriott’s Web Site
The Marriott company is very well at what they do, and that is getting people into their hotels and providing a quality experience. My stay at the Marriott Newport in Rhode Island was excellent. With that said, I am even more impressed with how their run their web sites and setup for each of their hotels.
There is nothing worse than looking to book a stay at a hotel, then they have a generic hotel web site that doesn’t provide location specific information and pictures for each hotel location. In the screenshot below you will see a screenshot of the actual site for the specific Marriott Newport in Rhode Island location.
As you can see, the photo in the screenshot on the “Fitness & Recreation” of the gym area is quite similar to the same picture I took myself. The pool photo on the web site is also the same pool that is in the hotel… my point is that Marriott is awesome at building web sites that are specific to every one of their main hotels and highlight the individual features and selling points of each… exactly what marketers have learned works best, keyword/topic/product specific landing pages.
While we are on the topic of landing pages… here are some other great resources I have previously written about.
Create Killer Landing Pages: Free Template – One of my most popular and most appreciated and commented on blog posts, is the one where I give away a free landing page for anyone to download and start using right away. If you are new to landing pages or don’t want to spend any money on a custom designed landing page, this is a great place to start.
7 Kick Ass Landing Page Tips for the Dating Niche – It’s quite hard to find a niche more competitive than the dating niche. Take a look at the many different landing pages out there and see what you can learn from how others are marketing their pages and increasing conversions with very smart and attractive call to actions.
How to Easily Split Test Landing Pages and Traffic Sources – There are many different solutions out there for split testing your creatives and landing pages, but LinkTrackr makes the process a lot easier by using their already built and hosted platform.
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