What is hotel content marketing?
Hotel content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable assets, such as videos, blog posts, and emails, as marketing tools to attract and retain customers.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), based in the US, defined content marketing as “…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content also drives traffic to your website and social media channels. What content marketing for hotels isn’t, is excessive promotional messaging. Content marketing may seem like a buzzword, but in fact it should be a crucial part of every hotel’s marketing strategy.
Nowadays, the majority of your guests are researching and booking their travel online. To catch their eye and keep up with the competition, you need to deliver top quality content consistently.
This blog will tell you everything you need to know about mastering content marketing at your hotel.
Table of contents
What does content marketing mean for hotels?
For hotels and other accommodation providers, content marketing is all about showcasing your property’s unique story and brand to the types of travellers you’re trying to win over.
Ultimately your content should influence travellers to book a stay, become a loyal customer and even champion your hotel to friends, family, and peers.
The key is to first provide useful content that informs and entertains. Secondly, it’s important to deliver it consistently to establish credibility and foster engagement. Win at content marketing with the right hotel software SiteMinder’s platform enables hotels to optimise their website, enhance their communication, increase online visibility, and more.
Why does hotel content marketing matter?
Your hotel is not just a place to stay – it’s an institution and a brand.
Travellers will often look to your hotel to provide them with useful information and advice, as well as seeking you out regarding policies at your property and in the local area.
It’s your responsibility to be a great host at all times if you want to ensure your guest experience is satisfactory. Content can help you achieve this.
How to create a hotel content marketing strategy
Before you begin creating any content, you first need to look at your overall marketing strategy and confirm a few important things:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are travellers to your area interested in?
- What makes your brand unique?
With this information in mind, you’ll be able to create tailored, useful, and original content for your potential guests and existing customers.
So what kind of content can you apply this to?
Hotel content marketing examples
Content marketing for your hotel offers a huge number of options in terms of the specifics of the content you produce. Your audience(s) will all have different things that appeal to them—and the types of content they’re actively looking for will change over the course of their buying journey—so it’s best to understand the full spread laid out in front of you before diving into one particularly intriguing aspect. The great thing about content is that it can be used in so many different ways to engage your potential guests.
Some common ways hoteliers can use content include:
Blogs
A blog is by far one of the best and easiest ways to start your hotel content marketing journey. Simply create a new page on your website for your blog and start writing!
Your blog gives you a lot of freedom and opportunity to cover a number of topics that will be of interest to travellers and guests including local area guides, listicles of best things to do, see, or eat, write-ups of local events or attractions, how to’s, guest blogs from professional travel writers, and more.
It’s a good idea to kick off your blog with topics that you have performed keyword research for, so you can get the ball rolling on search engine optimisation and maximise your website traffic.
Emails
Emails are still one the most useful and cost effective ways to engage prospects and customers. Email is also a great way to drive direct bookings and earn extra revenue.
Emails are an extremely versatile content tool. You can use emails to send out deals and offers, acquire new customers, retain existing loyal customers, blogs, promotions, updates on policies, traveller tips, announcements and competitions, giveaways, and more.
Make sure you’re building a strong email database by collecting guest details wherever possible.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a type of email you can send to people who have specifically subscribed to it, and it’s usually sent out on a consistent and regular basis. For example, you might send one newsletter on the last Friday of every month.
Newsletters give people a reason to keep opening your communications and coming back to your content, increasing the chances of you winning a booking. Newsletters are a great way to promote the goings on at your hotel and make travellers aware of any exciting activities and offers coming up.
Videos
As you’ve probably heard many times before, people always remember more of what they see and hear than what they read, so videos are a great travel content marketing tool if you want to maximise engagement.
You don’t have to have a big budget for producing video content either. Such is the power of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, audiences are very attuned to consuming content filmed on smartphones. If you do have the budget to go bigger, YouTube is still king.
Think about filming behind the scenes footage of staff and guests, showcase your amenities, highlight key attractions in your local area, create virtual tours, or even film mini-docos about the history and culture of your hotel or destination.
Magazines
Magazines might not come to mind immediately but when you think about how popular travel magazines are, it makes sense to explore the option of creating one for your own brand.
You could potentially release your magazine quarterly and include things like recipes of what you serve in your hotel’s kitchen, travel guides on your destination and local area, interviews with interesting guests or local celebrities, articles on the latest travel industry trends.
Having your own magazine will ultimately build the integrity of your brand, increase the trust people have in you, and boost conversions.
Social media posts
The popularity of social media continues to explode and it won’t go away. Even as some platforms fade, others take their place. Social media marketing allows you to connect with audiences in a variety of creative ways, making it one of the best places to boost both engagement and win new business.
Use Facebook and Instagram in particular to post all your important updates and content as well fun material such as memes, breathtaking images, competitions, and polls.
You also take advantage of user generated content by asking guests to tag you in their posts or to ‘check-in’ to your hotel on social media.
An aggregated sample of travel brands showed that 91% of user-generated content was of images, and 7% was video. The most prominent channel for this type of content is Instagram. The real interest lies in what type of images people are sharing.
On average, the data showed 39% were of landscape scenery, 35% contained people, more than 9% showed wildlife, and 4% featured food. While this may seem typical, it gives a good indication of what you should be doing to increase engagement.
Constantly posting photos of your rooms or physical property won’t inspire people. Beautiful landscapes and guests having a great time is more likely to do the trick.
Infographics
Infographics are liked and shared up to three times more than other visual content. They’re a great way of compressing a lot of information into a digestible chunk and making content more engaging. Businesses who use infographics report a 12% higher profit margin than those which don’t.
You might create infographics around how to plan and what to pack for an upcoming trip, interesting stats and figures, must-knows about the local area, rundowns of your hotel rooms and amenities, and more.
Infographics are easy to digest, making them a valuable resource for travellers who don’t have a lot of time on their hands to consume content.
Podcasts
Podcasts are becoming a go-to content resource for time-constrained audiences. Since you only have to listen, people can consume podcasts while working, commuting, exercising, or doing chores. This versatility makes them extremely popular and a great opportunity for your brand to make itself heard.
Hotels are a great focal point for podcasts too. You could tell a number of fascinating travel stories generated by guests, your staff, other hoteliers, and you could also partner with other podcasts or storytellers to create content each month.
Press releases
If your hotel is a large brand or a group, press releases are almost essential sometimes and are a great way to amplify your brand.
If you have a compelling announcement, put out a press release and allow travel and hotel publications to pick it up and run with it. This will get your message across to a larger audience and you might even attract new guests who weren’t aware of your hotel before.
Things you could speak about include major renovations, rebranding, new features or amenities, exciting partnerships and initiatives, new management, or awards that have been won.
Quotes
Large images of quotes are very popular on Facebook and Instagram to promote a short but powerful message. They’re simple and eye-catching, making them extremely shareable pieces of content.
Guides
Local guides can be a phenomenal content marketing tool that leverages the best parts of your local area, highlights your expertise, and captures interest at every stage of the customer journey.
If your hotel is in a popular tourist area (such as Palm Springs, California), it would make sense for you to post a guide on different restaurants to try in Palm Springs. Users like to look at a website as a repository of all of the unanswered questions potential customers may have. Answer those questions accurately and often and you’ll start to see new customers coming in your door.
‘Guides’ can also be how-to tutorials, in the vein of “how to pack your bag for LOCATION”, which can be an effective way to boost your search engine optimisation as well as funnel guests towards booking with you.
Customer Stories
Social proof is everything in digital marketing, and customer stories and testimonials are an incredibly powerful way to show off why guests should book with your hotel. After all, many people are savvy to marketing techniques, but it’s hard to argue when an actual verified guest can describe just how awesome their experience was with you and your team.
8 hotel content marketing ideas to convert more guests
Creating content is one thing but you also need to make every effort to ensure your content is reaching a large audience and is resonating with that audience.
Here are some of the best tips to keep in mind when implementing your strategy:
1. Tell your story
Every business has a story. To bring that story to the front and differentiate yourself from the competition, you need to identify your hotel’s unique selling points (USPs) and talk about it in a way that creates an emotional connection with your guests.
Through the use of visual storytelling with professional images, video tours, and real guest feedback and testimonials – you can more powerfully and immediately convey your message to web visitors. For greater effectiveness, be sure to focus your content around your specific objectives such as building more online exposure or driving more direct bookings.
2. Go for quality content
Hire professional writers to work closely with your marketing team to create high-quality, SEO-optimised content for your hotel’s website and blog that is targeted to your specific audience and age group: millennials, generation cohort, gen y, gen x, business guests, or families.
Give readers what they want by providing useful “insider information”, with a focus on local and trending topics, while simultaneously meeting your specific objectives.
3. Take advantage of user generated content
User generated content is low effort and low cost content that can really spotlight your brand. Always make guests aware of how they can tag you in their social media posts, so every time they post a holiday snap, their followers know exactly where to go if they want the same great experience.
4. Push content across all platforms
For even greater impact, content from your hotel website should be pushed across all of your social media platforms, as well as your offline mediums including print advertising, hotel guides, and directories. On your social media channels, share your hotel’s promotions and information on “micro-local” events, and encourage users to promote and share your hotel’s content with their friends and followers.
Depending on where your traffic is coming from, localisation requirements for your website need to be taken into account, for example, by offering booking options in multiple languages and currencies. By offering the best possible experience to guests on your website and social media channels, you can differentiate your offerings from your OTAs and other channel partners, helping to drive more direct bookings.
5. Work with influencers
Giving up a free night to win potentially hundreds more in the future is well worth it, and this is what can happen if you are successful in getting an influencer to visit your hotel. Offer them a free stay with all services provided and simply ask them to promote your brand to their large and loyal following. You can even give them a promo code to further incentivise their audience to make a booking.
6. Partner with organisations or tourism boards
Working with travel organisations or tourism boards gives your hotel a lot of bang for your buck since anything you produce with them will likely be marketed via their budget and resources, allowing you to reap the rewards.
Take SiteMinder customer VOMO for example, which featured as part of Fiji’s tourism campaign and included celebrity Rebel Wilson.
7. Always be helpful, authentic, and unique
Audiences can see right through disingenuous content so everything you publish needs to serve your target market first and foremost, while also helping your brand to stand out from the competition.
8. Stay consistent
To keep prospects and customers engaged and informed, you need a regular schedule of content that they can rely upon.
It’s a fine balance. If you don’t post content often enough people will lose interest, but if you post too often people will become overwhelmed and desensitised, and start skipping over your content. This is also why your content needs to be of consistently high quality.
How to use content marketing for hotels to increase bookings
One major goal for your hotel is always going to be centred on winning reservations and generating revenue. To make sure your content is working towards these outcomes, focus on:
1. Optimising SEO
It’s important to target high volume keywords to boost your rankings in Google’s algorithm. However, you also need to remember some of what your guests are searching for will be long-tail keywords with lower volume. You still need to create content around these because travellers will find it useful. It’s also vital to have a way to measure the success of SEO tactics, such as using Google Analytics.
2. Optimising CTAs
When you’re bringing in a lot of traffic via your content you want to give yourself every chance to convert the audience into a booking. Make sure you have clear calls-to-action such as your ‘Book Now’ button on every page on your website.
3. Combining content with an offer
Whenever there’s a chance to tie in any of your hotel’s amenities, services, or activities into your content – do so but make sure it’s natural and relevant for the reader.
4. Exciting your target audience
Today, 84% of people want brands to entertain them, solve their problems, and give them experiences. Interactive content is also proven to increase conversions so think about giving prospective guests something fun to consume, such as a quiz, which also allows you to capture their details.
5. Encouraging reviews
Reviews are almost always something travellers look at before booking a stay at your hotel, so you need to work hard at both satisfying your guests and convincing them to leave a review on your social media or on pages like TripAdvisor.
6. Providing a good mobile experience
With so many travellers now booking online and via their smartphones, you need to make sure your website is mobile friendly, meaning it’s quick to load, easy to read, and simple to navigate.
With 40% of users abandoning websites that take more than three seconds to load, guests don’t have patience for slow or clunky mobile experiences.
To increase your level of mobile conversions, use responsive design for your hotel’s website (Google’s recommendation), and ensure that your booking engines are fully functional across all mobile devices.
7. Optimising OTA profiles
Your OTA profile is a major touchpoint for travellers, even if they end up booking directly. You should treat the content on your OTA profile with as much care as the content on your own website to ensure visitors stay interested in your hotel.
8. Leverage on customer data
In some ways, customer data is the untapped economic potential of the 21st century. It tells you who your customer is, why they are your customer, what they are looking for, and how you can stay connected with them in the future. Hotels that harness customer data to drive more-personal guest experiences are likely to have the most loyal customers and will see the new revenue streams.
The best method to achieve this is to build out a data management plan, which includes where and how customer data can be captured and utilised to drive more business results. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but getting started collecting, managing, and using data is a great journey for any business in the 21st century.
9. Focus on the customer journey
Consider gearing your website’s content towards the different stages a traveller experiences throughout the booking process, for instance: inspiration, research and planning, booking, pre and post stay. To encourage guest loyalty, always create personalised, compelling, and timely content with a focus on locally curated topics. Promote your special offers, seasonal promotions, and leading events on your website, social media channels, and email and appeal to potential guests via the use of incentives and personalised offers.
With so many digital channels in use today, hotels must step up and meet the demand for personalised and appealing content that competes with OTAs and meta-search engines. By creating valuable, useful, and interactive content for your potential guests, you can go a long way in creating brand awareness, trust, and a more positive evaluation of your property.
Benjamas Kitsaengklai,
Assistant General Manager
Ping Nakara Boutique Hotel and Spa
