The travel industry is an incredibly competitive place and hotel owners will know they need to be putting out content online if they are to be visible to their potential customer base.
However, how do you know if what you are publishing is making a difference to your marketing efforts? How can you ensure that your content is making you stand out for all the right reasons? The most important thing to do first is go back to basics and remember that in order to be useful, content needs to either entertain or solve a problem for your target audience – and of course, you must know through research who your audience is.This is possible using tools such as Google Analytics, since you can analyse people’s browsing behaviour on your website, work out what they are searching for and what their ‘pain points’ might be and then come up with content tailored especially for them.Remember to be consistent with your message and appropriate for your target audience – millennials will need a different tone than baby boomers, for instance. Maintaining a consistent voice and also look across everything you publish will help to build trust.Here are three other tips you might find useful:
1. It’s about quality, not quantity In the early days of content marketing, success meant flooding your publishing channels with keyword-loaded, short content such as news pieces. Now though, search engine algorithms mean this isn’t beneficial any longer. Instead of writing for Google’s spiders, you want to be writing for would-be guests and looking to entertain and engage them.According to GfK Global, the average traveller visits 22 sites during their research and planning phase, so your content must hook them in straight away. You need to communicate how fantastic your hotel is without sounding too pushy and promotional.
2. What makes you unique?All hotels have something special about them, whether it’s their beautiful beachside location, their top-of-the-range infinity pool or their unbeatable haute cuisine restaurant. If you’re now pushing these unique selling points via your copy, then you’re missing a trick to stand out from your competitors.Take a look through your reviews and testimonials, work out what it is that makes you special and then incorporate it in your content (don’t forget to include photos as well as text) to really get people emotionally interested in booking with you.
3. Be a storyteller Since quality is now more important than quantity, your content needs to be really creative if it is to have an impact on its readers. Huge volumes of copy are produced for the internet every day and some of it is truly bland – there’s no energy and no personality coming through.How is this going to create an urgency to take action among would-be guests, inspire them or build trust? It isn’t.
Remember to be as creative as you can and paint a picture with your words that has people already getting on that plane and jetting off to your property.Use all the senses in your writing to inspire audiences based on your persona research and you should notice a real difference in your conversion rates.Using these tips should help you to add value to your content, better tell your hotel’s story and inspire people to go from looking to booking.
