The hospitality industry is crowded and competitive, with countless accommodations jostling it out for the top positions on search engines and on accommodation booking websites. But what if we told you that long-term hotel marketing success is actually best achieved through effective content marketing? In this article, we look at what content is, why investing in content marketing is a great idea, and five tips for creating a winning content marketing strategy for hotels!
What is content?
Content Hacker defines the word content as “a broad term that generally refers to any type of information provided by a website.” This refers to everything from the words on each page to the images that break up the paragraphs, the videos that people can watch, and the documents they can read or download.
Why invest in content marketing?
What about actually getting your content noticed instead of it just gathering digital dust on your website? That’s where content marketing comes in, and we’re sure that’s a phrase you’ve heard before. Content marketing is essentially the process of promoting your content in online spaces like on search engines, on social media and as part of email marketing campaigns. Investing in content marketing means you’ll:
- Get your competitive edge
Offering guests informative, entertaining content that enhances their hoteling experience gives them more reasons to return when next visiting the area. This value-added component to each guest’s stay could be the competitive advantage your hotel needs to set itself apart from competitors.
- Lower the cost of marketing
Content marketing can actually lower the overall cost of hotel marketing. When content is produced to be evergreen, and includes strong calls to action, a single highly shareable item can generate ‘free’ leads long into the future (or so long as that topic is relevant).
- Empower your hotel staff
Content lives on your website, and anyone you direct to it can access it, including people who work for the hotel. When staff understand the information in your content, they are better equipped to provide guests with accurate, interesting information that could improve their stay.
How to create a winning content strategy for hotels
Decide what you hope to achieve
Making content for the heck of it isn’t going to achieve anything significant. Hotels investing in content marketing should establish a goal for their content, or something they hope to achieve by publishing and promoting the content. Some reasons hotels invest in a content strategy include:
- Share interesting information with guests in a multimedia format
- Residual bookings as a result of shareable content’s virality
- Establishing an online library of resources for staff to draw from
Establish a set of detailed customer personas
Now that your hotel has an idea of WHY content marketing, the next phase is to get a clear idea of WHO the content will be talking to. Establishing two or three guest archetypes, complete with demographic details, likes and dislikes, and personality traits will help your content creators visualize the types of content that will resonate with your ideal guests. Here are a few examples of hotel customer personas:
Honeymooning Haylie: Female, 28, engaged to be married, possibly researching honeymoon venues.
Businessman Bert: Male, 47, married with kids, needs a comfortable place to stay here for business.
Ferreira Family: Female, 40, married with kids, needs family holiday accommodation near activities
A one-size-fits-all approach to content development is clearly not going to work, which is why doing this research before putting pen to paper is vital if you really want to resonate on a personal level with your audiences.
Think about the platforms you’ll use
Speaking about one-size-fits-all approaches, no two social media channels are the same. For this reason, you should know that your content isn’t going to resonate the same across all your social media pages. Instead of spreading yourself thin and trying to be everywhere, focus on one or two social media channels, like Facebook and LinkedIn for example, and expand to others once you have an established, effective content strategy in place.
Then there’s the question of duplicating content across different social media accounts. This isn’t advised, because your audiences on LinkedIn are expecting different content compared to guests who follow you on Facebook. If you’re creating unique content for each of your social media pages, it’s easy to see why focusing on one or two at first is a good idea.
Look at the types of content you’ll create
This is the phase of content marketing where you can really let your creative juices flow! Nobody wants to see the same-old salesy images and badly written posts over and over again. Today’s guests searching for hotels and booking online expect things like entertaining video clips, informative infographics, shareable PDFs, newsletters full of promotions, and other forms of interactive content. Here are a few ideas for engaging hotel content marketing:
- Hotel room and facilities walkthrough videos
- Informative, shareable blog articles and updates
- eBooks promoting attractions around the hotel
- Downloadable infographics and other resources
Establish an easy-to-manage publishing flow
The final component of your hotel content strategy is an easy-to-manage publishing flow. This is how your hotel will schedule, publish and monitor the reach of your content marketing. Social media post-scheduling apps like Sprout Social are a must and getting to know your hotel website’s content management system (CMS) is also important. For example, on WordPress websites, you can write and schedule website updates or blog articles well in advance and in batches to minimize your admin when publishing content to your online real estate. You can also look into automated content marketing solutions to further streamline your content marketing strategy.
How to establish a content strategy for your hotel
Open innovation is how small companies compete with larger, better-financed ones in their marketplaces. If your hotel doesn’t have the capability to execute effective content marketing campaigns, partnering with a team who can take this on for you is how you make it happen.
