Travellers are no longer just looking for certain snippets of information from your hotel’s website. Instead, they now crave personalised content that only you can offer them. As a hotel, you’re expected to stand out from your competitors – but how can you do this?
Well, instead of just including information such as the prices, location and amenities of your hotel, you need to offer even more to your potential guests. They want to know what’s going on nearby, places they should visit and recommendations for the best local places to eat and drink. They’re looking to you as an expert of the local area. You need to think about telling your guests a story – something that can captivate them and convince them not only that your hotel is the place to be, but that they should be visiting that specific destination.
Whether you’re based in a busy central city such as London or Barcelona, or a smaller and more unique destination hidden in the depths of the world, you have to do more than just sell yourself. Before you start though, it’s important that you actually understand who your audience is, and what type of content it is that they’ll want. If you’re filling your website with content that isn’t relevant to your target market, then you’re actually driving them away. So, the first thing you need to do is to establish the personas of your guests. You’ll find that your most common guests can be grouped into personas. These are groups of people with similar trends, that will usually be within one age group, demographic and have similar interests.
For example, you might be a hotel aimed at families with young children, or you might be more of a party hotel that attracts large groups of millennials. In order to find out what these key personas are, you should be looking at the data you already hold to establish your most frequent guests. Once you know this, you can begin to delve deeper. If you conduct social listening, you can begin to find out more about this persona type. You can understand their wants and needs from a holiday, as well as where they are online, the type of content they’re consuming and their common interests. Using this information, you can begin to build a calendar of content that you can create for your website that will really entice your audience.
It’s important to remember that this content shouldn’t be restricted only to blog posts. You can use custom graphics and interactive content, and entice them to engage with you with competitions, campaigns and outreach activities. One idea that has been adopted by multiple brands is a competition urging travellers to share their best holiday pictures. This is a particularly popular move among hotels and holiday brands where millennials are the target persona, as the use of Instagram and selfies is trending right now.
Of course, you don’t want to be the same as all of your competitors, so try to think of something unique. Look for a gap in the market and see if you can entice your target market with something new. Creating personalised content can create a multitude of opportunities for a hotel, and can be really exciting. As technology and digital trends continue to expand swiftly, there’s no end to the possibilities available to you to really draw your audience in. This is why it’s so important to ensure that you keep up to date with social listening and market research, as it’s your target market that will really tell you what it is that they want to know. If you see blog posts and forums filled with people asking for information on something, then this is your opportunity – you need to give it to them. If you don’t have the capabilities to keep up with this research, then it could be time to look for a content marketing agency that can help you out.
Rather than spending time and money on creating pointless content just so that your website and social media is filled with content, you need to know that you’re producing something that can really add value. By developing a solid content marketing strategy and constantly measuring the success of this, you’ll find that you can bring in more guests just by giving them the personalised content that they want. So, what are you waiting for? Go and start your research so that you can begin creating killer content and see your bookings go up as you carve a name for yourself as an expert in your local area.
