Paul West

Paul West is Managing Director at Ignite Hospitality Consultants and regularly contributes to various hospitality publications.

Anchor Text Linking for Hotel SEO

Most regular readers of Brightbox will know by now that links to your website help with your search engine optimisation. This article provides a little tip to help maximise the benefit of links that you develop.

Hotel Consulting in the Bahamas - Internet Marketing Update

Regular readers of the Brightbox Blog may recall Michelle's articles about our month undergoing on-site consultancy in the Bahamas.

Google+ Profile for Hotels & Restaurants?

Should your hotel or restaurant set up a Google+ account? Not yet according to Google. They are currently working on Google+ business accounts that will be much more suitable. Ignite's advice is to hold off setting up an account for your business until Google have done this.

Internet Marketing - The Ignite Analysis Model

There is no denying the increasing importance of internet marketing for restaurants and hotels. The digital marketing mix is becoming increasingly complex and the tools available to engage, attract and convert customers are constantly changing and improving. It is a dynamic landscape that demands regular attention so as not to be left behind.

Strategic Branding - Branded Chains Vs Chains of Brands

As a hospitality consultant that develops restaurant concepts you'd be amused to hear the number of times I've met a new client who assures me that it won't be long before they 'have one of these on every high street'. Whether it's the next big thing in Indian takeaways, Chinese restaurants, cafes or kebab concepts, these entrepreneurs frequently have one clear objective: multi-unit branded roll-out.

Pop Up Power

Pop-Up restaurants are quite literally springing up all over the place at the moment and as Christmas approaches this phenomena is no doubt going to become more intense. These temporary restaurants are usually found in unusual or vacant public spaces and recent examples have included the open top floor of a Westfield shopping centre building site in Stratford and the London Eye Pop-Up Restaurant, part of the recent London Restaurant Festival that turned each Eye capsule into a dining room with the best views in town.

Google Adwords Advantage

I've recently been working on a new Adwords account that we've inherited from somebody else. It's amazing how many people waste money on Google Adwords by not setting the system up properly. Inefficient PPC accounts are a great way to throw money away!

Crowd Force

At its soul the internet is a network of connections and this network is incredibly powerful. The speed and scope of the distribution of information in the dot-com world ensures that news spreads far and wide as quickly as it can be typed. Though this ability to distribute information can open the world's eyes to oppressive regimes and influence change for the good of humankind, it can sometimes be problematic for the hospitality operator. On the other hand, it can also be tremendously helpful and beneficial if harnessed in the right way.

Power Of Now

Marketing campaigns utilise a variety of techniques to encourage activity and to make people perform a desired action. The use of Urgency to make people act immediately is one technique that works especially well in the world of digital marketing.

Nothing Works in Isolation

Over the last few months I have been writing in this column about the various online marketing tools available to hospitality businesses and discussing how you can use these tools to drive business. In this final article in the series specific to internet marketing techniques I'll be bringing everything together to illustrate how the different communication tools interact and compliment each other.

Social Branding - Friends, Tweets & Check Ins

The world of social media has not long been with us but already it is a powerful marketing force. Word of Mouse cannot be ignored and clever hospitality operators know that this relatively new technology must be harnessed and nurtured. Social media channels can become highly useful marketing tools if you know how to use them. As with all marketing communications there are techniques you can employ to ensure they benefit your business rather than hinder it and it pays to understand how each of them work and how they interact.

E's Are Good

Hopefully that's caught your attention, because the E's I'm talking about are Email, the key communication tool that every hospitality business should be utilising on a regular basis.

You Get What You Pay For

In last month's Eat Out I discussed the art of Search Engine Optimisation and how to ensure your website is built in such a way that it is highly visible to Google. These techniques are free in the sense that once your site appears in the search results for your important keywords it doesn't cost you anything for people to find your website.

Be Seen to Be Successful

Following on from last month's article on website design for booking conversions, this month I'll be explaining how to ensure your website is as visible as possible to search engines. Marketing has evolved over the last decade as Search Engines such as Google enable you to place your business directly in front of people who are actively looking for what you provide. This is a very direct approach and is a highly cost effective way to communicate with your potential customers.

Internet Marketing for Hospitality

Regular readers of GS Magazine may remember an article about website design and the development of the gsmagazine.co.uk website. The GS site has continued to develop and now offers the GS Suppliers' Directory, a searchable online buyers' guide, and an online subscription facility for the magazine. Of course building a website is only really the first step in implementing online marketing communications. Once you have your website built you then need to ensure it is as visible as possible and drive visitors to it. This article will look at the tools available to you to ensure you reap the rewards, and the potential high return on investment, of your online presence.

Web Aware

I spend a great deal of my time on restaurant and hotel websites, assessing clients' online needs, analysing websites and implementing internet marketing techniques, and it never ceases to amaze me how many ineffective hospitality business websites there are! So over the next few editions of Eat Out Magazine I'm on a personal mission to help hospitality business owners better harness the power of internet marketing and will be providing you with a whole host of useful tips, approaches and insights on a range of internet marketing techniques.

Review: Riad Les Trois Mages - Marrakech, Morocco

'Boutique Hotel' is a term banded about by a staggering range of accommodation types from shabby beach huts to gorgeous design properties, and a true definition of Boutique Hotel is impossible to nail down. For me, it's all about the personal touch, considered and individual design, uniqueness and an outstanding service.

Order & Chaos - Effective Design Opposites

How do you create inspired and unique environments on an island where almost all the architecture is absolutely identical? An island where there are only two colours in the palette, white and blue? A sea of whitewash in stark contrast against the backdrop of a brown, barren landscape so that buildings dazzle in the sun? (If visiting, don't forget your sunglasses and go easy on the hangovers!)

The Death of the Age Of Bling - The Birth of the Age Of Thrift

As Bob D. once sang, the times they are a changin! And quickly. One minute it's all diamond bling, 10 grand bar tabs at Mahiki and eight course tasting menus for 200 quid a pop. The next it's queues out the door at Pizza Express with everyone clutching their 50% vouchers downloaded from moneysavingexpert.com. As Anthony Worrall Thompson goes bust, Alan Yau plans to roll-out Cha Cha Moon.

Paradise by Design

Like many of the planet's most beautiful locations, the Pacific coast of Mexico has suffered at the hands of the mega-resorts whose consideration of the local environment, history and culture is, at best, limited. Motivated purely by investment return, towering concrete blocks of replica rooms with neo-traditional, theme-park imitation architecture designed to pack in tasteless tourists by the thousands blot the landscape, ironically destroying the very environment that made the place attractive in the first instance. Paradise reduced to blandness.