In recent years, we are increasingly hearing the word “content marketing“, a term that is playing a decisively important role also in terms of hotels.
What is content marketing?
First of all, content marketing consists in producing and sharing high quality information material such as articles, images, videos and podcasts in order to increase their visibility.
From a hotel’s perspective, content marketing serves to bring out offers and content to potential guests.
If we were to summarize the content marketing in a sentence we would choose this:
The content creates relationships. Relationships are based on trust. Confidence leads to conversions.
The goal of content marketing for a hotel
The goal of content marketing for a hotel is to create:
- reach (reach of people who can get in touch with the contents);
- engagement (ability of a content to create relationships with users);
- conversions (bring the user to finalize the purchase).
To do this you need to create content that really interests your potential customers, but before doing so you must define a strategy to follow.
How to start a content marketing strategy for your hotel
1) Set goals
Before starting the creation of content, you need to set goals. What is the result you want to achieve?
Increase reservations? Make cross-sell/upsell on a booking that has already occurred? Increase the visibility and the brand of its structure?
2) Choose an audience
The answer we hear more often when we ask what kind of audience we want to reach is: “Everyone, of course“.
But if we are perhaps doing content marketing for a 30-room boutique hotel, whose accommodation starts at € 150, we should go to produce content for a “medium/high” clientele.
3) Creation of contents
Choose content that is lively and close to the interests of your guests.
Making storytelling does not mean promoting just one product, but putting your audience at the center of each campaign, just like Airbnb did on the occasion of the twenty-five year period since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
4) Distribution of contents
The creation of the contents is useless if they do not reach the pre-established public target. Look for suitable channels that can convey your message.
5) Make a point!
What is the point of doing all this work if the objective you have set is not realized?
It’s a bit ‘like when playing volleyball, it is useless to have a great lifter if then who crushes throws the ball on the net. This is also valid in this case, it is useless to produce good content if then when you have to make the reservation, you do not have a booking engine that helps to convert.
In one shot, we will have thwarted all our investments !!!
Video first – Videos are the contents of the future
Now the world is increasingly in the hands of smartphones and the same Mark Zuckerberg from 2012 had stated several times that the strategy of Facebook in recent years was based on the concept of “mobile first“.
Now that the goal seems to be achieved, the new mantra is video first.
The vast majority of the content that people will consume online will be video. It is undeniable how videos are becoming increasingly popular on various social networks including of course Facebook, making them easily usable and often of very short duration.
The Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2010) are tomorrow’s customers, they are purely visual generations, they love to watch rather than read, and the proof is given by the success of platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat.
The secret to creating good videos is knowing how to tell the life “in a nutshell” of your business, a sort of virtual tour that is able to fascinate the customer.
If you have a farm with a horse riding you can not not film the moment when you make horseback riding or the moment when you get out of hot croissants ready to be served for breakfast.
The tourist who peeks videos on social networks or on your site will feel emotionally involved and will tend to book more easily if he already knows that place that you showed him through your eyes. If you manage to convey the atmosphere that you breathe in your structure you are already halfway through the work, especially if the potential client is looking at it while he is in the office, immersed in work and strongly desires a holiday!
Ride the wave of content created by your guests
Building authentic and original content, such as sharing photos of your guests, helps to build a community that knows how to revolve around relationships that are authentic and above all spontaneous.
This is because sometimes traditional marketing struggles to reach customers who often do not trust the advertisements of the structure itself and prefer to rely on a sincere opinion of friends and relatives (this is where the success of the reviews comes from).
Pioneer in this aspect was the company of Luxury Hotel, Loews Hotel, which through the hashtag #TravelForReal has put the perspective of the guest in the foreground, demonstrating the genuine and real side of the structure.
After starting the campaign that has reached more than 8100 photos uploaded on Instagram, Loews Hotel has contacted their guests directly asking them to use the photos posted, thus giving the future guests an authentic and filter-free image.
SEO and content marketing: the golden couple!
Launching sponsorship campaigns with Google Adwords is essential, but the SEO factor that binds with content marketing is equally important.
Some hotels use their own blog to do content marketing and create quality content for their users.
This result reaches its peak with the SEO optimization that leads to a better positioning of the site in search engines.
Google encourages original content and having a good number of pages indexed in search engines leads your site to rise in position in the list of results.
The climb to SERP also starts with content marketing!
