I wanted the trip to be epic, and as the control freak I am, I wanted to have everything ready beforehand. The visa, papers, itinerary, hotel bookings; everything. 

The trip was indeed amazing. The best one so far.

Now that I think about it, I remember booking at those hotels who had their own website. Who had great reviews, and even a properly maintained Facebook page. 

Though, that’s my point of view. Not all travelers think like me, but a majority of them do. 

Those hotels I stayed at, were doing content marketing, knowingly or unknowingly. And that’s what influenced my decision. 

That’s the power of content. It can make or break your business. 

Today, all industries will agree that “Content is King”. BUT, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to master or even implement it. 

This blog will talk all about content marketing for hotels.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is all about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain your target audience. 

Putting in simple words, it is the practice of producing the content in forms of text, images, and videos and sharing it on different platforms, such as websites or social media channels.

A hotel’s content marketing focuses on producing content that your audience needs and likes to consume. 

The ultimate goal for hotels to do content marketing is to attract maximum people and acquire more bookings.

The key is to provide useful content that informs, entertains, and engages with your guests. Also, it’s equally necessary for you to ensure consistency in producing content.  

Let’s move ahead to the most common and obvious question in your mind. 

Why is content marketing important for hotels?

Most hotels must be implementing a wide range of marketing strategies, but somehow cannot achieve the desired results. 

One of the major reasons can be minimal or zero use of hotel content marketing.

I won’t be exaggerating, if I say that content marketing is the missing piece of your hotel marketing.  

This is exactly how content marketing strengthens your property’s market presence. 

1. Educates your customer

Your target audience is travellers; which can be further classified into business, leisure, group, solo travelers and so on.  

A deeper segmentation would lead you to the following basic categories: 

Segment 1: Passionate travelers, who look forward to exploring different cuisine, culture, unexplored places, and more.

Segment 2: Ordinary tourists, who travel once or twice a year to visit popular destinations. 

Now, your entire audience ideally has a lot of questions before booking with you. Obviously, you cannot answer them through your promotional messages. 

Here’s where content marketing comes into the picture. You can answer your audience’s and guests’ questions through content.  

2. Gives you a competitive advantage

When your hotel produces content, your guests start trusting you. 

This gives you a big edge over the competition, especially if they’re not offering the same services as you are. 

Your content marketing can show your guests that you consider them more than mere bookings. You want to deliver a better experience to them, and that’s what you want them to understand. 

Don’t go all “plain Jane” in sharing what you offer. Make them a part of a better story to grab more attention. Pictures, virtual tours, videos, texts; use anything and everything you can.  

Content marketing educates more than it sells. This will lead your guests to believe in you and select you over your competitors.

3. Lowers marketing costs

It is an undeniable fact that hotel marketing requires a massive budget. 

Getting the desired results might be more challenging than you think. Mainly because, the impact of sales and marketing has reduced (or has the buyer’s understanding improved?). 

As compared to older times, consumers are now less likely to respond to printed advertising or direct mail.

In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising and generates about three times as many leads.

Source

4. Helps cultivate long-term relationships with your customers

Consistent and regular content curation gives your guests a reason to come back for more and explore the untapped areas of your property. This develops a long lasting and loyal relationship with your guests. 

Eventually, your audience will pay more attention to your content if it connects to them and relates to them. 

With such content, you’re not just in it for a one-time sale.

Quality content can introduce your property to travelers, build relationships, and generate new leads and bookings—all for a fraction of traditional marketing.

5. Enhances your reputation

Not every guest will walk away happy. Guests may complain about poor room service, hidden charges, or rude employees.

However, with content marketing, you can control the narrative of your brand. 

Fresh hotel blogs, videos, and good website content will surely outperform your negative ratings.

On top of that, there’s an opportunity for your content to rank and show up in search for your hotel’s name.

5. Helps you in SEO

Content marketing paves the easiest way for you to rank higher in the search results. 

With just website content, it becomes challenging for you to write keyword-rich content. 

Whereas if you are producing blogs of average 800 words, then you can add at least 5-10 keywords in each blog. 

In this way, you are giving more content to search engines as well as your audience. When it ranks well on the search engines, you are assured to get significant online exposure. 

Basically, you MUST do hotel content marketing. 

As Robert Rose said, 

“Marketing is telling the world that you are a rockstar, content marketing is showing the world that you are the one.” 

Now, as I explained earlier, there are different types of content. How to decide which type of content should you produce? 

Let me explain to you about:

Which types of content can hotels produce and promote?

At present, OTAs are engulfing entire search results. They’re outranking hotel websites, which makes your brand exposure a lot lesser than expected. For that reason, content marketing becomes mandatory. 

And let’s not forget the fact that your guests are not looking for mere accommodations. Rather, they’re looking for a wholesome and memorable experience. 

They’re exploring Instagram, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Google reviews to make up their minds. They’re digging deeper than ever before to find what they like.  

And that’s why you need to have the right content marketing strategy in place. 

Here are some ideas to produce and promote content for your property:

1. Local Attractions and Events

Let me ask you a question. Why do guests visit you? Or rather, why do leisure travelers visit your city?

Simple, to explore the city and the culture which your city has to offer. 

Suffice to say, localized content goes a long way to attract your guests. Even the local guides on Google reconfirm this fact. 

Travellers are seeking rich, engaging, original tips, and ideas about your destination ALL THE TIME. You can (Read: SHOULD) provide detailed information answering all of these questions about local attractions. 

This is an excellent marketing opportunity for hotel properties. Create a welcoming guide that mentions your location, scenic destinations, and best places to eat, drink and hangout in detail.

Local events can turn into popular blog posts – what’s coming up, how to enjoy the events, and itinerary ideas around the popular events. From listening to live music in a fan-favorite pub to checking out a tourist attraction, you can customize this guide in limitless ways.

#Hotel content marketing tip: You can also partner with local businesses and offer some of their popular products in your rooms. So, guests get a local taste (sometimes literally) right when they arrive.

2. Photos

Factually and actually, visuals grab more attention than content.

As Brain Rules says in one of its articles, 

Hear a piece of information. Three days later; you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%. 

You experience this. And even I do. 

Content with images is much better than content without. But, RELEVANT images. 

So, when I ask to share pictures and videos, I don’t mean the old-fashioned and common hotel photos. Nah, I don’t want you to do mediocre. Be unique, and show that uniqueness to your audience. In fact, shout it out. 

For better photography ideas, take a look at Airbnb. You will see how properties are highlighting their unique aspect. All the images strive to show what makes their place different. 

So the key point is to showcase and celebrate your differences. Take rich, vivid photos of your property, highlight what makes the rooms different, and focus on the quirks and oddly beautiful things – like scripture, or colorful interior that makes your hotel room stand apart from your competitors.

3. Virtual Tours

As the name suggests, virtual tours are in effect, 360-degree videos that revolve around your property. Your guests get a glimpse of how your property is and what can they expect if they book with you. 

The Gen Z today is searching for more such experiences to help them in their decision making. 

A 360-degree camera can capture an entire room, and allow you to upload a self-guided tour where viewers can look at whatever they want. 

This helps increase site time and time invested in your brand too, so there are extra benefits.

If you have enough budget, you can even invest in VR/AR experiences.

4. Food, wine and other best things

Who doesn’t like to talk about food, wine, and similar indulgent experiences when on holiday – or even during a business visit? 

If you’ve got these services, flaunt them. 

Talk about seasonal menus, your wine list, how you choose your beers, the winemakers and brewers behind these beverages, your spa menu, and so on. 

If your property does not have a spa, write a blog about the top spas at your location. 

Expand your F&B focus to popular local spots – tucked-away eateries, local foodie personalities, new openings, and best of series.

5. Travel Tips

Travel tips and tricks are something that all guests are looking forward to and is an important part of your hotel content writing. Basically, you can create content around:

• What should travellers pack? 
• What will the weather be like? 
• Is the local water safe to drink? 
• How to book activities?
• How to get around? 

Travellers have a lot of questions about your destination. Use your blog to answer these and be relevant.

If you don’t have a dedicated content writer or if you do not produce content on a regular basis, you can also give an updated list of best destination blogs to read.

If your hotel is located in a foreign-speaking country, you can also make a list of useful everyday phrases in a language guide.

6. Behind the scenes (BTS)

At first, this might seem like an odd choice for important hotel content. 

But this is the trend right now. Businesses and even hotels are showing a sneak peak of how things work behind the scenes to make their audience connect more. 

Content marketing from B&Bs and hostels has blurred the line of difference between them and traditional hotels. 

People respond on an emotional level automatically when they see pictures and descriptions of other humans that they’ll get to meet.

So practice some employee advocacy, and use social media – along with your own site – to showcase happy pictures of enthusiastic hotel staff and why you appreciate them so much. 

People absolutely will make their booking decisions based on such emotional content (and your staff will appreciate it too).

7. User Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is a valuable source of social proof – and something that your audience totally relies on. 

There are a few ways to get such quality user generated content. 

1. Through Guests: Encourage your guests to leave reviews online. Remember to use this content for testimonials! These days, the trend is to get a guest selfie posted on social media platforms. 
   
   You can later use this content on your social media. 
   
2. Influencers: You can partner with influencers of your industry who can give you traction through their own content. In return, you have to offer them free rooms or other bonuses when encouraging them to write about your hotel. 
   
   It’s a sure shot strategy to attract millennial travelers.
   
3. Partners: These are businesses you work with for events, catering, supplies, local activities, and so on.
   
   If you have a good relationship with these partners, talk about creating content together to cross-promote your brands. 

#Hotel content marketing tip: It’s the era of celebrity culture with fans showering their love for their “FAVES”. So if you have a celebrity visiting your town, talk about it. Consider posts like “Meet celebrity A hitting golf at... "

These were a few ideas for your hotel content marketing. 

Now that you know which types of content can you produce and promote, let’s move on to content strategy for your hotel. 

How to form a content marketing strategy for your hotel?

You cannot start content marketing just like that. Without a well-formulated content marketing strategy, you may not see impressive results. Or worse, you may not be able to DEFINE your results. 

Don’t panic. I have shared how to do that in this blog. 

All you have to do is follow these steps.

Step 1: Understand your target audience

Too many hotels make a mistake of advertising to anyone and everyone. In the end, their message impresses no one. 

If you have a property for everyone, you will end up with no one.

Modern tourists want a personalized service tailored to their preferences.  But, you cannot have an offer that meets everyone’s needs. So decide which market segment you want to focus on..

To know more about your audience type, dig out some past data and find out which type of guests do you welcome at your hotel often? Are they couples, millennial travellers or business travelers, families and groups?

This is important because the entire content you create should be intended for the target group you choose to serve.

Step 2: Set the goals for your hotel content marketing

When you set your target audience, it’s important to know why you are creating content for them.

Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with the content you post on the hotel website, blog and social networks?

Of course, you want more bookings, but are those direct bookings or OTA bookings? 

Any strategy or plan without goal is just a wish. 

You should set specific goals for every piece of content you create. Without a goal, you may never realize what you have achieved. 

Do you want to increase the visibility of your hotel, or to strengthen your brand, get new guests or increase the number of visitors to your website? 

So, analyse your hotel’s requirements and set your goals accordingly. 

Step 3: Define your content tone and adhere to it

Hotel content writing is not as easy as it sounds. 

You should develop the content creation procedures – how photos are uploaded on different channels, what size should be used, what kind of copy goes with them, and so on.

These templates may take a little more time in the beginning, but they will also bring you recognition and save time later.

Moreover, this will make it easier for more people to do the job, or when “introducing” a new person – it’s much easier if there is a pattern that is being monitored.

Step 4: Tell your story

Storytelling is currently the biggest trend in hotel content marketing.

The stories are interesting and people love them.

They can sometimes be told with just one photo. Create your own little everyday stories, which convey your property’s characteristics. 

Make sure you tell the stories of YOUR hotel, and not copy those which you find interesting. , and not copy the others that are interesting to you.

You may like to read: 7 Ways to Use Storytelling for Brilliant Hotel Marketing 

Step 5: Stay active on social media

Use social networks in a professional way.

Although they should be used in a professional way, this does not mean that you need to have a boring corporate approach.

Social networks offer you an ideal opportunity to present your offer in an informal way, as you may not be able to do it on the website.

Use the opportunity to be witty and interesting.

Choose the right voice for social networking. How? Well, remember your research on your target audience. Who are these people, what do they want to hear from you, how can you address them? 

You need to have all these answers in your target audience analysis, and if you do not have one, do the analysis again, in great detail. This will help you to craft your social media messages to the specific needs and interests of your audience.

Create a content strategy for each social network. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you strategize your hotel’s social media marketing.  

Coordinate your hotel content marketing distribution through different channels. There are several places on the internet where the potential customer can see your offer: hotel website, social networks, blogs, e-mail, etc.

Design the procedures for placing content across these channels: when to post, who should post, and so on.

Step 6: Analyse regularly

Do not be afraid to look at your analytics. Do it daily, but make sure you know how to read what the data tells you. It is

Though, it’s not enough to just see your analytics. Track them, monitor them. You’ll be able to use them to make better marketing decisions. 

Look at pages that have higher visibility and are ranked well on Google. Make more of these content and pages. BUT, make sure it is unique and comprehensive. 

Find pages having low visits, low rankings, higher bounce rates. Analyze these pages, try to conclude why they are not performing so well and change them, or, in the end, delete them.

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