Content Marketing for Hotels & Resorts | Your One-Stop Guide

If you’re looking into content marketing for hotels, then you’ll need to promote your offerings and increase brand awareness. But sometimes, getting traffic through your doors is not as easy as it may seem. A little marketing can go a long way in promoting your hotel, Airbnb, or resort.

Allowing potential visitors to get to know your brand or business in the online space before taking the plunge and making a booking is the best way to build rapport and trust with potential clients. So let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of how to implement a content marketing strategy for your hotel.

Why Is Content Marketing Important for Hotels?

Let’s first address what content marketing for hotels actually is. Content marketing is the act of marketing your business by providing valuable content for your audience. Rather than outwardly promoting your business, you are creating value for the reader, giving them a reason to follow your journey, ultimately, doing more than just telling them to come and stay at your hotel.

Why is this important in the hotel industry? Ideally, you should aim to be top of mind when a traveller is planning their journey to your respective destination. How do you do that? Provide them with information that would be useful to their travels. This includes things such as:

• Itineraries
• Things to do guides
• Where to eat guides
• Unusual activities in the area
• Safety tips for the area
• Guides on how to get around in that area

All of these things can come in very handy to travellers venturing to your region. If you ensure that this content is available to them, then you are right where you are needed when the time comes for them to book a hotel stay.

Hotel Content Marketing – Everything You Need to Know

Now that you understand just how important content marketing can be in the overall marketing strategy of a hotel, it’s time to find out exactly how you can use content marketing to your advantage. This is everything you need to know about content marketing for hotels.

Find Your Target Audience

Before you can start to create content aimed at a very specific group of people, you need to choose who those people are going to be. Ask yourself, “who is most likely to enjoy an experience at my hotel?”

You can also look at historically what types of people have come to stay at your hotel. Are they young, vibrant partygoers? Are they elderly people who prefer to stay in for a quiet night? All of these aspects will influence where you aim your content marketing, as well as what kinds of content you will be posting.

Build a Customer Persona

Once you have identified who your target audience is, you need to create a persona for a specific person that aims at embodying your average customer. You should outline very specific traits such as:

• Name
• Gender
• Age
• Occupation
• Location
• Photo
• Likes
• Dislikes

Every time you begin creating content, look at your customer persona and ask yourself whether the content you are creating would benefit this persona. All the content you create should be geared toward this individual.

Determine Which Platforms Work Best for Hotel Content Marketing

While it heavily depends on the type of content you are going to be publishing, it’s best to spread out efforts over a couple of platforms (while not spreading yourself too thin). The best platforms for hotel content marketing are:

Hotel Website

Believe it or not, you can take part in content marketing right from your very own website. By starting a blog section, you can create long-form content that is very useful to your readers. Things like itineraries, eating guides, things to do in summer lists etc., can come in very useful to potential travellers, especially when implementing hotel SEO.

Instagram

Because travel is a very visual topic, it’s great to use platforms that allow you to display beautiful imagery and video content. Instagram is perfect for this, and it also allows you to write long captions to provide further useful content for your readers.

Tip: Click here to find out more about hotel social media marketing.

Pinterest

Pinterest is great because it allows you to create inspirational travel boards. Your potential audience can follow your pins for all their travel-inspo needs. This is a great platform to use to inspire potential clients to stay at your hotel.

Repurpose Content Across Multiple Channels

Just because you are choosing to use multiple channels for your content marketing doesn’t mean that you need to create unique content every single time. You can repurpose content from one channel and use it in others. In fact, this is best practice because it could drive followers on one platform to become traffic on your website – pushing them further down your sales funnel.

If you have written a blog post, consider using snippets from that blog post in your Instagram feed. Alternatively, if you take some photos for your Instagram feed and Pinterest boards, you could use those same photos in a blog post.

While the content does need to be adapted so that it is more suitable for the audience using the specific platform, it most certainly can be repurposed. This way, you don’t have to create brand-new content from scratch each and every time.

How Often Should You Post Content for Hotels?

This highly depends on the platform, but you should aim to post on your website at least once a week. When it comes to social media, posting frequently keeps you on the right side of the algorithm so that as many people see your posts as possible. Posting on a daily basis, or at least a couple of times a week should be a top priority.

How to Ensure People See Your Content

On social media, the use of a good hashtag strategy can help put your content in the eyes of those that may already be looking for what you have to offer. But when it comes to your long-form blog content, a whole different strategy is required.

In order to get your posts seen, you need to try to get them to rank in Google SERPs with the use of SEO. Search engine optimization encompasses many different rules, but the main one is to create content that people are searching for with the use of keyword research.

You can use tools like Ahrefs and KeySearch to find keywords that are easy to rank for but have the potential to bring large amounts of traffic to your website. You will then need to use keywords in headings and scatter them throughout the content so that Google crawlers understand exactly what the post is about and can rank it accordingly.

Make Use of Content Clusters

It’s important to cover one set of topics at a time. For instance, if you want to write about travelling to your region, consider writing a post about things to do in each season. For example, “Things to do in Cape Town in summer”; “Things to do in Cape Town in winter” – covering these topics in entirety before moving on to the next topic, such as food and beverage, is best practice.

Why is it a good idea to do this? Well, you want Google to see you as an authority in a niche. And the best way to do that is to show crawlers that you truly do know everything about the topic. It also shows readers that you are an expert in your niche which is just as important.

Building trust with your audience and potential clients is an absolute must. This is because travellers will only make a booking at hotels that they trust to take care of their every need.

Make Use of Longtail Keywords

When choosing the keywords or topics you want to write about, it’s always best to aim for longtail keywords. This is for two reasons:

1. They are easier to rank for, fewer people have written about “things to do in Cape Town in summer” than have written about “things to do in Cape Town”.
2. You reach a far more targeted audience. If people are searching for “things to do in Cape Town in summer”, then you have reached an audience that will be in Cape Town in summer and will likely enjoy the summery activities outlined in your guide.

Content Marketing Hotel Advertisement Ideas

Now that you have a basic idea of what is involved in content marketing, it’s time to put those ideas into practice with a content marketing strategy that won’t disappoint.

Create Content Around Hotel Pillars

What do we mean by that? Well, create content around a set of themes that would be interesting to your particular target audience. While you do not need to create content around all of these themes, pick a couple and try to cover every sub-topic possible in relation to that particular topic (this way, you become an expert in every sub-niche of your niche).

Here are some themes that you should consider adding to your content calendar:

• Local area
• Behind the scenes
• Food and beverage
• Seasons
• City events
• Celebrations or occasions
• Travel tips
• Attractions
• Places of interest
• Travel itineraries

Each of these themes has many sub-themes that you can dive into to create killer content for your target audience. Remember that content marketing is not all about sales pitches but, instead, about creating content that is valuable to your audience.

Best Content Marketing Ideas for Hotels Wrapped Up

If you are looking for hotel marketing ideas that won’t break the bank, then content marketing is one of the best directions you can take. It allows your audience to get to know you at their own pace and builds trust over a period of time.

It may not be the quick fix to driving bookings on your website, but playing the long game can pay off in the long run. Hotel content marketing works best when used in combination with other advertising practices such as hotel PPC (pay-per-click advertising) and SEO. Are you ready to kick-start your hotel content marketing journey?