Today's on-line marketing environment is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, and consequently, savvy hotel marketers are viewing their web-marketing a bit differently.

A bricks and mortar hotel is comprised of various business units, such as Guestrooms, Food & Beverage, Banquet & Conference, Spa, Golf course, Retail space and other facilities. Most of these business units have their own management, logos, positioning in the local marketplace and departmental P&L statements.

Let's look at hotel Websites from the market's perspective. A potential bride is looking for 'weddings' in a certain destination. If she looked in the local Yellow Pages under "Weddings" she would probably find a listing for the hotel's function space. Would she find the same listing in a Google search? Probably not.

Second generation on-line hotel marketers are beginning to try to think - and market - the way their customers approach their searches for the services hotels supply. These hoteliers establish web-presences for each functional business unit - a strategy known as "horizontal marketing" - where the hotel presents its various offerings and creates websites and search strategies based on the business unit, not on the hotel.

Say, for example, a famous hotel in South Florida has spent millions on building a new state-of-the-art spa for both its guests and visitors in the area. A simple search on Yahoo for ' Spa South Florida' or even "Spa XXX destination" does not reveal this multi-million dollar investment to the on-line consumer.

Horizontal marketing applied to this example would ensure that the search engines were optimized to serve up the new Spa to anyone searching for such a place and location. The beauty of such horizontal marketing is not only that it increases exposure for each business, but more importantly, allows the hotel to build e-mail databases specific to the business unit by asking for customer opt-in data within each specific niche. Databases of on-line customers interested in Spas, Golf or Restaurants are far more valuable to the hotel e-marketer than the traditional 'Contact Us' email format of vertically constructed first generation sites.

So, how do we execute the horizontal on-line marketing strategy?

• Weddings
• Meetings
• Spa
• Golf
• Restaurants
• Casino

• www.anyhotelweddings.com
• www.anyhotelmeetings.com
• www.anyhotelspa.com
• www.anyhotelgolf.com
• www.anyhotelrestaurants.com
• www.anyhotelcasino.com
• (Note that these sites include the hotel name, not the name of the business unit.)

• One to five pages in length
• Linked to Home Hotel Site
• Include an opt-in Email acquisition form on their individual home pages

• There are many hotels vying for top placement for searches like 'Hotel South Florida'. For now, there only a handful of hotel marketers that have embraced the horizontal marketing strategy for their sites. Organic searches for 'Spa South Florida' are easier to obtain, and the Pay Per Click cost of the same key words are a fraction of their hotel counterparts.

• Each Micro-site should be optimized with the meta-tags that reflect the business unit. Key word descriptions, home page text, alt-tags and other SEO programming will be different than the main hotel site.

• You may not realize that the Websites "Google" and "Yahoo" serve are delivered in order of both popularity and sponsorship. The ad banners at the top and right side of the "Results" page appear because the advertiser has purchased the keyword(s) the consumer requested in the Search.

• The Spa business unit can be linked to other sites offering Spas in South Florida. This local linking of sites not only brings customers interested in similar facilities, it strengthens the organic search options of the micro-site. Search engines give a higher ranking to sites that are linked to similar businesses than 'stand-alone' sites.

• Make sure your wedding brochure has anyhotelwedding.com as a call to action.
• The answering machine at the Spa should have the message, 'If you need more information, please see our new website at anyhotelspa.com.'
• Any advertisement for the meetings market should bring the consumer to anyhotelmeetings.com to give them the information they need quickly.
• Use the email addresses gathered from these sites.

The Spa site has generated 1,000 email addresses in 2 months. What should you do? Convert lookers to bookers! The cost of delivery to this database is negligible. Create a Spa newsletter to get these customer to your facility. Have a last minute cancellation of a group? Go to the 1,500 emails gathered from www.anyhotelsmeeting.com and let them know you have a 'hot date' to be filled.

Speed to market, and email campaigning can be executed in 48 hours. Cost of delivery, next to nothing. Every email is trackable, you can measure the results of every campaign. And you've already received permission from the recipients to email to them.

Horizontal marketing also gives you the option of intensifying activity, or testing a promotional approach in a discrete arena, rather than across your whole Website. It also allows you to support each business unit with other marketing tools on a targeted basis.

Second generation Websites must be about more than Flash introductions, interactivity and database building. Second generation on-line marketing programs must also morph into tools that better match the intuitive approach consumers bring to their on-line searches.

Clearly, horizontal on-line marketing provides the multiplier effect that allows a hotel to bring customers - and revenues - into the business from a variety of different businesses. Where vertical on-line marketing provides one channel, horizontal on-line marketing gives you many. What better way to expand your hotel's reach into the Internet environment with strategic effect?