Hospitality marketing is a powerful business tool for engaging guests and increasing traffic. A 2023 study from ReviewTrackers found that 94% of consumers said a negative review convinced them to avoid a business. Your reputation and brand image—in person and online—directly impact your business’s success and revenue.
Think about the last time you booked a hotel stay or chose a restaurant or bar to visit. The odds are that you did some research to make your decision, so you looked at content from the business and other people who have been there and shared their feedback online.
This type of content is critical to businesses in the hospitality industry, as many customers base their choices on marketing and user-generated content. Keep reading to learn the top strategies for creating content that engages and converts customers.
- Surveys and Feedback Forms
- Social Media Listening
- Guest Reviews and Testimonials
- Creating Detailed Buyer Personas
Types of Valuable Content in Hospitality
Leveraging Technology for Content Creation
Hospitality Marketing and Analytics Tools
Measuring Content Effectiveness
Understanding Your Audience
For hospitality marketing efforts to be effective, you need to know and understand your audience. The audience is the cornerstone of successful marketing strategies in any industry. In hospitality, you should know who your guests are, what they value, what motivates them, and how you can create content that speaks directly to their wants and needs.
One of the best ways to get to know your audience is to gather customer insights. There are several methods you can use to do this.
1. Surveys and Feedback Forms
Issuing surveys and feedback forms is one of the most direct ways to gather insights about your audience. Most customers appreciate an opportunity to let you know how they feel about your business and their experience with your brand, so they’re often quite honest on these forms.
These tools allow you to collect valuable information on what’s working and what isn’t, helping you inform business decisions to make improvements wherever necessary.
2. Social Media Listening
Social media is a goldmine for gathering information about your target audience. Monitoring conversations, comments, and mentions related to your brand and the hospitality industry allows you to see what customers think about your business.
This gives you a deeper understanding of what your customers care about, what they’re looking for, and how you may be able to address those wants and needs before your competition does. There are countless social media listening tools, such as Hootsuite, Brandwatch, and Sprout Social, that can do this work for you and track insights.
3. Guest Reviews and Testimonials
Most people check reviews and testimonials from other customers on platforms like Yelp and Google Reviews to help them decide which hotel or restaurant to choose. If you want authentic customer insights, reviews and testimonials are where you should be looking.
Analyzing reviews can uncover common themes and trends that inform business decisions and future hospitality marketing efforts. You can also highlight positive testimonials and reviews on your website or social media to build trust and credibility with your audience and attract potential guests.
4. Creating Detailed Buyer Personas
Buyer or customer personas represent the ideal customer you want to serve that you can create based on actual data and insights you’ve gathered, including demographic information, preferences, and behaviors. Detailed personas are extremely valuable in helping you create targeted content that resonates with specific parts of your audience.
The ability to effectively target individual groups in your general audience is vital to making hospitality marketing campaigns more effective.
Types of Valuable Content in Hospitality
Once you know your audience, you can create content to get their attention. When organizing your marketing operations, consider including these types of content in your hospitality marketing strategies:
1. Blogs
Blog posts are a versatile part of any hospitality marketing strategy. They can cover various topics and leverage SEO best practices to drive your brand’s website traffic. Moreover, creating informative, engaging blogs can position your brand as a trusted source.
You may cover travel tips and money-saving strategies or even curate local guides for travelers. Whatever the topic, a well-written blog can show up toward the top of search results, attracting prospective guests who may be doing research for their next outing.
2. Videos
Videos are some of the most engaging hospitality marketing content you can use. They allow you to showcase unique aspects of your business, including behind-the-scenes looks at your brand’s operations, virtual tours, and even guest testimonials.
Investing in high-quality video production can capture the ambiance of your space, highlight amenities, and evoke emotions in viewers. For example, say you want to attract families to your hotel. You could create video content that highlights your space’s family-oriented features, showing happy families enjoying the amenities and even giving testimonials about how great the space is. Other people looking for a family vacation spot may see your video and be moved to book a stay with you over the competition based on one well-produced video.
3. Social Media Content
Social media platforms are ideal for reaching existing and potential customers, so engaging social media content should be central to any hospitality marketing plan. Each time you post on social media, you have abundant opportunities to interact with your audience in real time, particularly in the comment section, which helps you enhance your brand’s online presence and build customer loyalty.
You can also use socials to promote special offers, like giveaways, and leverage influencer marketing. According to recent data from LinkedIn, 75% of people use social media to get purchasing advice. This is a significant number, and you could be missing out on engagement and potential conversions if you’re not using socials in your hospitality marketing.
4. Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are another excellent hospitality marketing strategy, especially for engaging with current or previous customers. By sending offers, updates, and other exclusive content directly to people’s inboxes, you keep them informed and engaged with your brand. Sending out regular email blasts ensures your audience won’t forget about you.
Moreover, you can segment your email subscriber list to send personalized messages and offers. For hotels, you can leverage data such as whether their stay was for business or pleasure, the type of room they booked, and even the total amount of money spent during their stay to send tailored offers that previous guests are more likely to resonate with.
5. User-Generated Content
Because potential guests rely so heavily on reviews and real customer testimonials to decide which businesses they’d like to visit, user-generated content is worth its weight in gold for any hospitality marketing strategy.
You can help generate this content by encouraging guests to share their experiences and photos on social media using branded hashtags and then repost it on your brand’s channels. These practices and sharing this content increase your brand’s visibility and credibility and help foster a sense of community and a trusting relationship between you and your audience.
Crafting Compelling Content
If you’re going to elevate your hospitality marketing strategies by creating and sharing more content, it needs to have purpose and be compelling to get your audience’s attention.
The content creation portion of your hospitality marketing campaigns may take a little trial and error to determine what resonates with your audience, but ensuring you have these four elements will set you up for success:
1. Storytelling
Storytelling, the art of creating a narrative that resonates with your audience, is crucial for any successful marketing campaign. Stories can connect you with your audience on an emotional level. A compelling story is relatable and gives your audience a reason to care about your brand and content.
You can use storytelling to create a throughline in all your marketing content or highlight your brand’s history, specific guest experiences, and even the local culture to form that more profound connection with guests.
2. Visuals
If your content isn’t visually appealing or engaging in some way, it won’t get attention. Images and videos should be high-quality and capture aspects of your brand in a way that words can’t. Think of the common saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” What are your visuals saying to your audience?
3. SEO Best Practices
In the digital age, if you want to appear in web searches and reach your audience, you need to employ SEO best practices. These include keywords, meta descriptions, and internal linking to improve your search rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website.
4. Consistency
To succeed in your hospitality marketing strategies, you must be consistent in your brand voice and posting schedule. Consistency helps establish your brand identity and ensures customers know what to expect from your brand.
Before creating content, determine your brand’s tone. Is it casual and humorous? Or maybe more professional? From there, create content that aligns with your decided brand persona. Moreover, consider using organizational tools, like a content calendar, to help you plan out posts.
Leveraging Technology for Content Creation
It can feel overwhelming if you’re new to creating content for a hospitality marketing strategy or simply looking to update and elevate your current efforts. There are many moving parts to any effective marketing strategy.
Luckily, we have technology to make the process a bit smoother. There are several tools and platforms you can leverage to help you create and manage marketing content, including:
- Content Management Systems
- Content Creation Tools
- Analytics Tools
A content management system (CMS) is every marketing team’s best friend. It helps you organize and publish content and can even streamline collaboration among team members, as multiple people can create and edit content. Some standard CMS options include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Brightspot.
If you’re not a trained graphic designer or don’t have someone on your team with design skills, there’s no need to worry. Several tools are available to help you create visually appealing content, and you don’t need to be artsy or a designer to use them.
Tools like Canva and Adobe Spark are user-friendly and allow you to create high-quality graphics, videos, and other visual elements. These tools make the job easier by using templates and providing educational resources to help you create professional-looking content that stands out.
Hospitality Marketing and Analytics Tools
Once you’ve created and shared some content with your audience, you’ll need to track its performance. This is where analytics tools like Google Analytics and Buffer come into play. These tools track social media data and extract insights on essential metrics like engagement and conversion rates.
When you use analytics tools to track campaign performance, you’ll be able to identify high-performing content, better understand audience behavior, and identify any pain points that will enable you to make adjustments to improve your strategies moving forward.
Measuring Content Effectiveness
With your hospitality marketing campaigns, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” It’s essential to monitor all your efforts to see how effective your content is. Measuring content effectiveness helps you identify what is and isn’t working with your audience.
You can pull the campaigns that aren’t performing well and edit them to yield better results. And for the campaigns that are performing well, you can focus on boosting them to get more views and using what worked to inform future content.
Two of the key ways to measure content effectiveness include:
1. Tracking Key Metrics
When launching a new hospitality marketing campaign, you need to establish key metrics you want to track that will determine how well the content is performing. The metrics you deem most important will vary depending on your brand and business goals, but generally, it pays to keep an eye on these elements:
- Engagement Rates, which include the likes, shares, comments, and other interactions that come with sharing content on social media. Higher engagement rates mean your content is interesting and resonates with your audience, which is precisely what you want.
- Website Traffic and Time on Page can show you how engaging your content is if visitors spend more time on one page than another. Website traffic, in general, is important because it indicates how many people make it from your marketing content to your website.
- Conversion Rates can include the number of bookings, reservations, or general inquiries you receive from your marketing content. These are critical metrics as they directly track whether your content is working.
- Email Open and Click-Through Rates are particularly important to track for email marketing campaigns. If you’re sending email newsletters, you want to know exactly how many people are opening your emails and clicking through or engaging with the content inside. This helps you determine whether the content is compelling or relevant; if not, you can make changes.
2. Analyzing Data
Once you launch your hospitality marketing content, you can analyze data to refine your content strategy continuously.
You can start by identifying your high-performing content. Take a look and see what’s working. The metrics you’re tracking — like engagement rates, website traffic, and conversions — can help you make this determination. From there, you should evaluate why those high-performing pieces are so successful. Is it the visuals? Perhaps the platform you used or the time of day you posted?
Analyzing high-performing content will help you understand what resonates with your audience. You can then use those insights to improve and tailor your hospitality marketing content to better meet their wants, needs, and interests.
When you regularly analyze the data from your marketing content, you’ll inevitably come across elements you could change or get rid of altogether. A willingness to adapt based on performance insights is critical. You will only grow if you’re willing to make changes when necessary.
Conclusion
Hospitality marketing is a valuable tool for businesses to boost engagement and conversions. However, for a hospitality marketing campaign to be successful, you need to know your audience, focus on creating compelling content, and measure your content’s effectiveness to make changes as necessary.
The hospitality industry is competitive. Moreover, the digital marketing landscape is competitive. For your efforts to be successful, you need to be able to innovate and adapt your content strategies as technology and the industry evolve.
Now is as good a time as any to analyze your hospitality marketing content. There are likely several opportunities for you to make adjustments that improve your content to help you attract more customers and foster long-term growth for your brand. The sooner you start a revamped content strategy, the sooner you’ll reap the transformative benefits of a successful marketing strategy.
