Hotel content marketing is fast becoming a vital part of every hotel’s digital marketing strategy. You can’t just win clients with ads anymore, be it TV, paper or billboards. Cue the hotel local content marketing strategy that involves interactive content creation to increase traffic and make sales.
Simply put, there are two main reasons to use content marketing and SEO for hotels; first, providing information for your guests, and second, generating more traffic and conversions.
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Content That Builds Trust
Travelers are becoming more and more inquisitive about the places they visit and often look at a number of websites before making a decision about where to go and where to stay. If you run a good classy hotel but don’t have a comparative content marketing strategy, hotel will suffer. Here are some ways in which content marketing hotels benefits guests and hotels as well.
Tell Your Visitors Who You Are
At the base of any big content marketing plan, there has to be a good mobile optimized content website. Your website must tell your guests who you are as a brand and what your values are. This should be done using a variety of methods; web video content, content marketing pdf, stories about the inception of your hotel, and more. Using a portal content management the right way will make the visitor develop an affinity for your brand, and make them feel like you are a brand they can trust and rely on.
Tell Your Guests About Your Surroundings
There are two aims to this. The simple one, tell your visitors how to get to your hotel. The other, to tell visitors about the attractions and activities in your neighborhood. Places of interest close to the hotel, night markets or flea markets that guests will enjoy, restaurants, shopping streets, upcoming events in the area, these go here. The more information and original online content that you provide potential guests, the more likely they are to book with you!
Content That Converts
If a site visitor is still deciding between your hotel and another when they land on your site to check, the information you provide them will be a deal clincher. Using good quality exclusive content for hotel blogging makes all the difference to that booking going through!
Lower Cost of Marketing
Outdated methods of advertising on third party sites, televisions, billboards, leaflets and more still get you a few bookings, but have a higher cost of overheads. As opposed to this, content marketing SEO combined with a correctly used photo content management system will significantly reduce the investment required.
Increase Search Engine Trust Rankings
Fine-tuned and creative content production that can be hosted on your own site, will also increase your trustworthiness in Google’s eyes. Giving visitors relevant and useful information and answering questions that they might have about your hotel or about the location you are in, will increase your relevancy, both with search engines and with your guests.
Cascading Effects Of Constant Content Production
Many hotels are now using social media such as Facebook and Instagram to connect with their guests. A content coordinator can create create visual content for campaigns that are appealing and target a specific audience. Content that reaches the audience on their own wavelengths can add value and have better reaches than plain advertising.
Say for example, you don’t have a social media team. So you nominate a staff member and send them for a short curating content course. He or she then starts posting an image with a funny tidbit about your hotel on Facebook or Instagram every other day. A reader might start following because they find the info interesting, even though they don’t book a holiday with you. But they might share your posts with friends and family, who in turn will book with you. The cascading effect of these hotel content ideas will eventually be a number of bookings.
User Generated Content
In 2015, Loews Hotels and Resorts ran a #travelforreal campaign that captured guest experiences. They asked their guests to post pictures that showed their experiences of the Loews Hotel and tagging them in it. This resulted in a mass of user generated content that Loews was able to tap and use on a social media microsite using the tagline “Because nobody tells our story better than you”.
This simple strategy resulted in a lot of UGC for Loews, which naturally resulted in savings of the cost of a professional photographer. It also resulted in guests feeling more valued, which resulted in them posting and sharing them more.
The crux of the matter: user generated content records micro moments of travel, personal stories that add emotion and values to pictures and literally bridges the content gap.
Takeaway: guests that feel valued will bring you more guests! So don’t quash your Instagram content ideas; evaluate, evolve and use them!
Stop Clicking Around : Expect Better, Expect Hilton
Want your guests to come to you directly instead of using aggregators and online portals to book their holidays?
Think of something like the “Expect Better. Expect Hilton” campaign of 2018. With celebrity actress Anna Kendrick on board, it generated 4.5 million bookings across the world and more than 9 million new Hilton Honors loyalty program members.
By booking directly with Hilton, guests become members of their loyalty program and have access to over 5900 properties in 114 countries. Guests have options of flexible payment, looking at floor plans choosing rooms that they love, and gathering points to qualify for free stays. By working to benefit their guests, Hilton has ensured that they actually benefit themselves as a brand!
Campaigns like this can generate thousands or millions in revenue. But, and here’s a really important but; they won’t be possible without a really good content marketing travel industry website!
Content Marketing Tips
Well, this is a tough one! Should you export your content marketing or should you develop your website content ideas in house? That’s a call you’ll have to take. There are many examples of websites with good content that you can look at while deciding if you want to work inhouse or outsource.
They’ll help you decide between sending your existing staff to a content marketing university or choosing a content jam. Research is also what will help you decide between using an expensive creative content agency London or a personalized content marketing agency like us. Whichever way the hammer swings, we wish you luck with your content marketing strategy!
Have more questions? Be sure to join our Hoteliers Elite Facebook group, we will be happy to help you!
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