Hotel content marketing is a strategic marketing approach (SEO marketing) to creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to engage your targeted audience, satisfy their needs and get more direct bookings.
In this article we'll take a look at some content marketing tips which are proven to deliver great results.
Content not only promotes your hotel's brand and personality, but also motivates travelers to revisit your hotel. Content marketing is the best way to attract your hotel’s target audience, increase their engagement, strengthen your branding niche and maintain customer loyalty and advocacy.
Hoteliers must have a robust content marketing plan in order to increase their direct bookings.
Why is content marketing important for hotels?
The fundamental tenet of content marketing is educating your guests. It builds their trust and gives them compelling reasons to come back to your hotel's website.
Valuable content is crucial
If your content is relevant, innovative, and high quality, it will be shared and sourced by others. Content gives you a competitive edge.
Your hotel content should answer questions, inform needs, entertain and provide tangible value to browsers and potential guests.
The structure of your content should be authentic and reflect your personality and your brand.
When viewers trust your insights, they are more likely to choose your hotel for their next trip giving you an edge over your competitors.
Content lowers the cost of marketing.
Digital advertising is now the preferred and more effective channel compared to printed advertising or direct mail. Having great website content which is also ready to post to your digital advertising channel is extremely cost-effective.
How do you create a content marketing strategy for your hotel?
Attracting your potential guests starts by defining a content marketing strategy which is congruent and unique to you. It should take into account your property, target guests, location, accommodation, and services.
Set goals for your marketing content
What do you want to achieve with the content you post on the hotel's website, blogs and social networks? The visibility of your hotel? Increasing the number of visitors to your website? More direct bookings? More returning guests? A competitive edge?
Answering this question affects every other aspect of your strategy. You need to focus on your specific goals for every piece of content you create.
Get to know your target guests
You need an offer that meets a specific aspect of your guests’ needs or a niche market, otherwise you will create inappropriate content. For example, is your hotel for young people, families, honeymooner or retirees?
It's important for you to think about the desires, interests, purchasing power, and preferences of your target guests. The better you know your potential guests, the better you will know what type of content to create.
Choose the right channels for your content
The right channel is defined by your potential guests and you need to know where they are spending time to create the right content for those channels.
Once you know that, you know where to focus your time and energy leading to better results and a more efficient use of valuable time.
Create new and relevant content as often as you can
The frequency of content publishing depends on your ability to generate good quality content and the channel through which you want to distribute it. As a guideline, you need to create content for blog posts once a week and for social media at least once a day.
Use the hotel staff to create content
Nobody knows the hotel better than its staff. Getting employees who have great passion and knowledge of their department to write, or to suggest ideas for, content is very effective and provides an authentic tone.
To further attract and entertain your target audience, you could present one of the room service team or the gardener on social media posts; conduct an interview with your manager; post some of your chef’s recipes or provide a ‘day in the life of…' article.
Comments and guest reviews
Reviews are a type of content and most people read both positive and negative reviews and comments from previous guests when choosing a hotel. Good scores and reviews on TripAdvisor and Google My Business and social media platforms are critical to your business.
You have to accept criticism, as well as praise, and respond to them appropriately to maintain your credibility, as your target audience will read them.
It is always best to deal with particularly bad or persistent reviewers offline, by offering to liaise with them directly.
Measure and manage your efforts regularly
To know what is actually working for you requires a systematic measurement tool such as Google Analytics. Once you can measure the outputs you can manage the process.
Not only should you have a system for measuring clicks, users, sessions, shares and other vital metrics, also consider hiring an expert to monitor your success, measure your data, and make strategic recommendations for you.
Given the importance of great content for your everyday marketing activities, Aró Digital can help you plan, design, implement, and measure the effectiveness of, the content for your hotel’s digital marketing strategy.