Identity is for a person exactly what a brand is for a company.

So, what would you do if someone copied your identity? Who would you be? Nobody!

Someone with no characteristics,  no value, no individuality, no purpose and no direction.

Respectively, a company without a brand is a company with no positioning and of no differentiation.

Your brand is your identity so it is important to guard it or you will be brand-jacked!

Brand-jacking is the process of someone assuming your online identity for the sole purpose of promoting or selling their product or service by exploiting your brand awareness or else brand name.

As a Hotelier how can you protect your brand?

• Trademark your brand
• Maintain a consistent social presence, define your status, character and voice and communicate it to your customers and associates without changing your brand image through time.
• Promote your logo/brand through social media in order to establish brand awareness.
• Make use of Google Alerts through which you can get a notification on a daily basis every time your company name or brand is mentioned online so as to see who is using your business to their advantage.
• Take action against paid search advertising, also known as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing allowing travel agencies and booking websites to bid against your hotel for ads concerning your own property and generate bookings for your hotel through their own website.
• Increase your online presence through SEO, by using the right metatags, metatitles & keywords in your urls and content of your websites.
• Make use of backlinks that you can generate from link building in order to enhance your brand presence and link browsers back to your own website.
• When linking to other internal pages on your website, use anchor text (text links) leading to your home page.
• Create a blog that includes keywords and text links increasing your ranking and linking viewers to your homepage or whichever page you wish to promote.
• Use images both in your website and your blog that are titled, (Alt text) so as to keep a dynamic presence in all search engines.

 Don’t let others generate profit from YOUR brand awareness.

Use your own brand to increase traffic on your site and boost revenue.

Don’t be Brand-jacked

Be…Brand-smart