If you’re a hotel owner or any other hospitality business, a solid customer base will be the foundation of your business.
Hotels are not merely venues where you spend leisure time but they prove to be valuable sources of information that could be of immense benefit to you.
Generating new leads in any business can be a challenging task, especially for the hospitality industry. But a powerfully crafted content marketing strategy can take care of that.
Powerful content can help boost your customers’ loyalty and strengthen the position of your brand.
There are many ways to implement a content marketing strategy for your hospitality brand. This post will guide you with seven content marketing tactics that you can implement to make your content marketing campaigns successful.
7 Content marketing ideas to help your hospitality business grow
Whether it’s an email, blog, podcast, webinar, or video, a powerful content marketing campaign requires thoughtful planning and execution to succeed in the hospitality industry.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 61% of customers purchase a product after reading related blogs or seeing product-related reviews or recommendations.
Now let’s dive into the seven content marketing tactics to help you grow your hospitality brand.
1. Create relevant content to connect with your audience
Source
Develop content that speaks to your customers, no matter what you’re offering. Here are a few ways to do it:
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- Find out what your audience likes and needs
- Ask your audience by sharing a question or poll on social media platforms
- Check out the top pages in the industry and learn from your peers in the industry
- Do a keyword research (you will learn more about this in the next step)
- Create marketing personas to get an idea what type of content you can create and share on social media
- Keep an eye out for general trends on the social media and follow them
2. Perform a keyword research
Though this suggestion may look obvious, content marketers sometimes neglect the significance of a thorough keyword research. For SEO, it’s essential to optimize your content and other aspects of your websites, such as titles, metadata, and URLs.
You should always be sure about what your users are looking for and use the relevant keywords on your webpage to make that search easy.
For example, if you search “budget hotels downtown Palo Alto,” The Nest Hotel will appear at the top of the search results because its URL and this exact key phrase “budget hotels downtown Palo Alto” has been optimized for the search engines.
Keyword research takes a considerable amount of time. There are many free tools available to help you quickly locate keywords that are related to your business or product/service offering. Google Keyword Planner helps to determine the demand for each keyword and the level of competition. It can also help you with campaign creation based on keyword research.
3. Build a robust email marketing strategy
Having a proper schedule for your email marketing campaign should be first on your list. You don’t need to send emails when recipients are rarely open. To start, research and segment your audience to find the ideal time to reach your customers.
You can use an automated method to send emails to various segments of your audience at the right time, making your email marketing far more accessible.
It’s also essential to ensure that your emails are not just important but also very useful.
To create a comprehensive experience, ensure that content is consistent across all media. As a result, you should maintain a brand name that is consistent and not be afraid to repurpose your content. But the most essential point is to start with premium quality content.
It would help if you made sure that your emails only sell your content and not your hotel venue. The content of the emails should be related to the events or the attendees. Keeping the COVID crisis in mind, you can include some unique offsite activities and suggestions on socially distant rooms. You can also share pictures of how the planners helped in creating engaging events at the same venue.
4. Leverage your social media platforms
For increasing hotel brand awareness, social media is a powerful content marketing tool. As a hotelier, you can send pre-event and pre-check-in emails to encourage attendees and planners to follow social media pages and promote exclusive content there. It will increase your online visibility and improve your number of followers.
Make sure to invite your customers to engage with you on your social media pages either by liking the page or engaging with other audiences through comments or shares. You can also use various channels to promote your forthcoming events.
In social media campaigning, you will get tools for an automated ad campaign. You can use brand management software to improve your workflow and instant campaigns. It helps to create, deliver, and measure perception and awareness about your brand.
With this software, you can control your brand locally and globally with the right brand management tools. It allows social media marketers to create paid or organic posts for all their social media networks from one place.
Take RIU Hotels as an excellent example of a perfect social media strategy. Despite having over 500,000 Instagram followers, they still manage to respond to comments. They are forming great relationships with customers.
Three core building blocks for a robust social media page:
- An effective strategy: Start by understanding which platforms your target buyers prefer to use. You’ll also need to set goals: are you trying to boost group bookings, drive more traffic, or get more followers? All of the above may be accurate, but rank them in order of importance.
- Competing content: Social media posts must be distinct from any other forms of content. Ensure they’re accessible, searchable, short, relevant, and visually appealing. Explain how they can do this and provide an example screenshot of someone doing it well
- Audience engagement: Keep your followers engaged and interested in your content. Respond to comments and complaints as soon as possible. Inquire about the opinions and suggestions of your followers. Competitions or freebies are a great way to get people excited about your page.
5. Create a content calendar
This part is simple. A social media content calendar is used to plan and manage the upcoming content. It is a summary of your upcoming social media updates. You can organize it in the form of a Google calendar, spreadsheet, or interactive dashboard. There are two main benefits to using this method.
Firstly, it allows you to maintain your audience better and attract new prospects. You show the user that you are active and engaged by regularly promoting content, making you a more relevant and helpful resource.
Secondly, Google likes seeing websites that are constantly tweaking and providing new content. Google encourages you to create and promote new content and update and optimize old content regularly.
Why?
Simply put, it indicates that you are an active resource who continues to create new content. Google is a big fan of content.
It’s also worth mentioning that Google considers even minor changes to existing pages on your site to be new content. The more regularly your content is updated, the more positively Google will regard your website.
Always consider how to entice both your users and Google.
6. Promote to your target audience
All of your content should be your net in any successful content marketing strategy. It’s up to you to decide what to do with the leads you catch and how to nurture them.
To increase the visibility of your new content, it’s a good idea to use the traditional ways of the digital marketing mix, which includes any or all of the following:
- Organic social media posts
- Paid social media posts
- Emails
- Influencer marketing
7. Measure results and optimize
Without specific metrics, no marketing approach can be considered a success.
This should ideally comprise a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as benchmarking. Tasks like these can often fall by the wayside if you don’t have enough resources to manage your content, promotional channels, and analytics effectively.
Try Google Analytics if you’re only going to look at one source of data to determine the success or failure of your campaign.
Google Analytics can gather up all relevant on-site data, conversion data, and a large amount of social and email data.
In Google Search Console, you can track impressions and click-through rate in addition to traffic and user behaviour. It will show you whether the keywords of your content are ranking in an organic search translated to impressions and clicks.
It won’t provide you with a complete picture of performance, but it will tell you whether your content is performing well or needs to be modified.
Conclusion
Content marketing is an excellent way to grow your business. Always make sure that everything your writing is relevant and beneficial to your audience and that you’re consistently providing outstanding value. Google will value you more if you are suitable and valuable to your audience.
Regularly casting nets to attract prospects is a sure approach to build a robust marketing funnel. Follow the simple suggestions mentioned in this blog and continue to put in the hours. You will see a long-term return on your investment for your content marketing campaigns.
Credit
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an Instructional Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin.
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Related article: Local SEO Tips That Help Drive Hotel Bookings in 2021
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I need to let you all know that we are in on this together. If you need to vent, talk, cry, or just have some to talk with, I am here listening. Since I am working part-time at the local Kroger, I will best work it out around my schedule to the best of my ability.
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NOTE
The hotel industry still is facing some uphill challenges. Make sure you follow their guidelines and say THANK YOU to those that now show a unique spirit to serve, and helps us all get through this!! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong
About Are Morch
Hi, I am Are Morch. Your Digital Transformation Coach helping hotels create unique and unexpected experiences by freeing up resources to focus on new ideas through value innovation and a growth mindset.
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