If you own a hotel, it means that you have a much closer connection with your customers than many other businesses. No matter how long they are going to stay, they should rely on your suggestions regarding accommodation, dining, and entertainment.
Hotels are not just places where people spend a few nights, they are also sources of information, and you can use it to your advantage. The best way to reinforce your image as a reliable source of information is to provide valuable content that will help you maintain positive relationships with customers and convert prospects.
Good content enables you to boost customer loyalty, strengthen your brand’s position, and increase engagement. Content can be the basis of your marketing strategy and supplement your customer service and operations. If you’ve never used content marketing before, we recommend that you start to do it. Let’s focus on some actionable tips that will help you incorporate content in hotel marketing and come up with an effective content marketing strategy.
1. Post content about your policies and offerings
If you want to stand out from the competition, you should create lots of different content, keeping your customers up to date about any changes in your policies and, more importantly, your offerings. We recommend that you write blog posts with detailed descriptions of offerings and make sure to use relevant keywords.
One of the most obvious channels for sharing updates with your customers is email. However, you shouldn’t limit yourself to emails only. You can also create videos and use social media to reach the widest audience possible. Besides, make sure that your updates are visible on the website.
2. Create authoritative content
Valuable and compelling content will help you increase the number of inbound links and establish authority in the industry. The more websites link to your content, the more valuable your content will be for search engines. We also recommend that you post reviews.
Reviews are beneficial not only for your overall operations but also for your SEO rankings. Search algorithms like review content because it is valuable for consumers and relevant. Hoteliers can encourage their customers to leave reviews by sending emails after the stay is over.
3. Do keyword research
Although this advice may seem obvious, sometimes marketers forget about the importance of keyword research for content marketing. It’s important to SEO-optimize not only the content itself but also other elements of your website, as well, including titles, metadata, and URLs.
You should know what your target audience is searching for and make sure to use appropriate keywords on your website. For example, if you google “luxury hotel downtown Chicago,” you will see the Peninsula Chicago hotel at the top of search results, and the reason is that its URL and the website is optimized for this exact keyphrase.
Doing keyword research can be time-consuming, but it’s not too difficult. There are countless free tools that enable you to quickly find keywords related to your industry, and one of such tools is Google Keyword Planner. It will help you estimate the popularity of each keyword and the competition. This tool can also help you create campaigns based on your keyword research.
4. Create a strong email marketing strategy
One of the most important things about email marketing is to have the right schedule. You don’t want to send your emails when they are unlikely to be opened by recipients because it will hurt your stats. First, you should research your audience and segment it to determine the best time to contact each group of customers. You may also use automation that will make it much easier for you to send different emails to different segments of your audience at the right time. It’s also extremely important to make your emails not only relevant but also actually valuable.
You need to ensure the consistency of content across different channels to create a comprehensive experience. Therefore, you should stick with a consistent brand voice, and you shouldn’t be hesitant about repurposing your content. However, the main thing is to have high-quality content, in the first place.
If you don’t have talented copywriters in your in-house team, you can always outsource them. There are many online writing services that can help you. You can choose the best dissertation writing service and order content for your emails, because most of such companies work not only with students but also with business clients, as well.
5. Use social media
When it comes to content marketing, social media should be the key part of your strategy because this is a very popular channel. You can encourage your customers and prospects to follow you on social media so that they can not only consume your marketing content but also share it and leave their comments. Social media also enables you to share your upcoming events. A great example of a strong social media strategy is RIU Hotels & Resorts. Even though they have over 400,000 followers on Instagram, they still manage to reply to comments and engage with their audience in a genuine way, building strong relationships with their audience.
Wrapping up
Content marketing can be incredibly effective. People are much more likely to ignore just another boring hotel advertisement than well-crafted valuable content that actually helps them learn some useful information. We hope that our simple tips will help you get started with content marketing and use it to your advantage.
