Can content marketing influence how hotels and resorts fill their rooms every season?
It’s Summer, and all the world is on vacation. Hotels and beach resorts are mostly burgeoning with guests, and the most competitive hospitality businesses have gleaned the lion’s share of premium stay nights. For every hotels sales team, there’s big profits in knowing how to create the right content marketing mix. Here’s a few tips any hotel marketer can used to differentiate any property during any season.
Content marketing is not just about throwing words on a flyer, or pushing photoshoped images in front of customers, hoping to lure them in. Content marketing is the foundation of future guest experiences, a promise of good things to come, a personal message that ensures guests that the hotel cares about more than filling up rooms.
The basis of good content marketing is research. As an example, hotel sales professionals need to ask questions like; “What are the most interesting things to see in the Summer at our destination?” Guests obviously visit places based on such things, local uniqueness such as when the Fall leaves are most dramatic, or when the temperature is just so. When do the local parks look at their most magical, or which festivals are the most exciting? These and other questions lead inextricably to better content ideas for marketers.
As a “for instance” here, the Qi Xi: Seven Sisters Festival is a unique event in Hong Kong takes place in August of every year. The Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Night is a tradition that dates back over 2,000 years. Also known as the “Night of Skills”, this unique event showcases young girls showing off their domestic skills to potential suitors. Young ladies compete for attention by doing fancy embroidery or even food preparation. For hoteliers, knowing how to do more than offer discounted prices on social media is crucial, if differentiating themselves from the competition is at all desirable. For example, potential guests can be converted via various sharing promotions.
Using stunning photographs and interesting tidbits about an event, hotel marketers can create challenging online events, conduct polls, or otherwise engage potential guests in fun and interesting ways. Then, adding a discounted stay as incentive, it’s easy to see how a Qi Xi dinner for two can optimize conversion. Shared Facebook experiences actually become part of the overall guest experiences, once a hotel brands in an integrated way with an event. This is how traveler habits are formed too, but that is a subject for a deeper conversation. The legend of Qi Xi is revealed in the video below, but you can imagine how little westerners will know of this wonderful event when traveling to China during August. Being informative with your Facebook content takes on new meaning here.
Another example of tailored content marketing strategy might be the Festa del Redentore; (Festival of the Redeemer) held the third weekend of July each year in Venice. This unusual festival celebrates human survival, more or less, as it commemorates the city dwellers who lived through the devastating plague that lasted from 1575 to 1577. City dwellers feared no one would be left alive when this horrendous epidemic was befell the city. In commemoration, the Senate, thanking the Redeemer (Jesus) for answering its prayers, built Il Redentore church and started an annual festival. The two day event is something of a social masterpiece where everyone in Venice seems to climb aboard a massive fleet of gondolas. Fireworks, and citywide galas being all the rage, the culmination being a huge gondola regatta and a high mass at the lofty Patriarch of Venice in Il Redentore, on the island of Giudecca. As epic as the imagery here is, guests will surely be expecting even more epic specials and content to match from your hotel.
At the Festa del Redentore Venetians build a living gondola bridge to the island of Giudecca
Of course every destination has such important festivals, and your local media should be the first stop for announcing your hotel’s special discounts and offers. Once key local outlets have been notified, then it only makes sense to contact international media to spread your message. But pay close attention, far better than offering a few percentage points off your best room price, every hotel is best advised to provide brand via a real experience: welcome guests with traditional Venetian treats; decorate your lobby accordingly; place some Venetian haute patisserie in the rooms too; organize a theme party; and finally, mark the holiday with a special cover picture on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks where your guests are active, and follow your updates.
Be sure and prepare well in advance: time to create copy, banners, info materials, and special packages for any event that takes place in the Summer is now. Don’t postpone it, and don’t wait for the last minute. Make a list of all the social networks where you intend to reach out to potential guests, and keep your message consistent, without being redundant. Adapt your copy to each social network, but be consistent in imagery. Brand your images with your logo and your slogan: this is a good way for people to remember your name and look for your hotel for future trips.
To summarize, these are some of the things you will have to do to reap the benefits of a well crafted content marketing strategy:
- Identify the most important events in your area, their dates and their most exciting features
- Decide on special offers, and packages for guests potentially attending the events
- Create professionally written copy to introduce the events, and the benefits of staying at your venue, for travelers potentially interested in attending
- Acquire necessary decorations for your venue in advance, hire a professional decorator to extend the festival experience to your premises
- Identify the most profitable keywords, and create custom, professional ad copy for your AdWords campaigns
- Create specific banners for your AdRoll campaigns, or campaigns in other ad networks
- Create specific cover images for your social media profiles
- Plan a Facebook giveaway, or a contest with incentives for travelers who choose your hotel to stay during the event
- Create professional copy sharing on social networks
- Decide upon imagery, video and rich media to share with followers
- Create a social media sharing calendar, and stick to the plan
- Get in touch with the local media to inform about your special offers and packages
- Plan theme parties and events at your location, and promote them in time.
Using these clear examples as a guide, even hotels situated in the busiest and most competitive beach resorts can differentiate and excel at content marketing. Adding to these that touch of individual creativity can only help brand that memorable guest experience more personally too. Caring for what travelers like, keeping them informed and delivering on the promises that you make during your content marketing campaigns, boosts trust and keeps guests happy, motivating them to choose your hotel, over competitor accommodation.
For those interested in learning more about PR and content marketing for hospitality, I’ll be joining the experts at Digi.travel EMEA Conference; Expo 2016, in Athens, November 22-23.
Editor’s note: a version of this article first appeared on Travel Daily News International