10 Content Marketing Tips You Need To Know

Posted on Feb 17th 2015 in Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most important ways to catch your guests’ attention and drive more bookings online.

It’s also one of the most difficult skills to master.

If you know you need to up your content game, but you’re not sure where to start, here’s a list of 10 tips to guide you.

1. Start With Professional Writing

You wouldn’t skimp on décor for your property’s reception, so why let amateur writing damage your guests’ first impression of your hotel online?

Badly worded, confusing copy will have potential guests bouncing from your website like a rubber ball. Leave your text content in the hands of a professional copywriter who knows how to use language to showcase your amenities and invoke the experience of holidaying at your resort.

2. Add Eye-Catching Images

Poorly lit, grainy photos are even less likely to drive bookings than low quality copy. Invest in a professional photography service and show off your property’s best features with high-definition images that make it easy for guests to imagine the long, lazy days relaxing by the pool they crave.

3. Consider Creating a Video Tour

If you really want to convey what life is like at your property, video content is hard to beat. Creating a short video tour of your hotel’s exterior, bedrooms, garden and leisure facilities not only allows guests to see exactly what they are getting when they make a booking, it helps capture the unique ambiance of your property too. Video is one of the most shared types of content, which means investing in a brief one to two minute virtual tour of your resort could pay dividends when it comes to reaching a bigger audience via digital word of mouth.

4. Be Unique

What separates your property from the crowd? What do you do differently to your competition?

Whether it’s your family-run approach, the free WiFi and coffee at reception or your airport shuffle service, make it easy for guests to discover what makes your property special.

5. The Details Matter!

Following on from point 4, don’t forget to include the full details of your property’s services and amenities within your text content. If you provide an iron and ironing board in each room, clearly state that on the room’s page. Likewise, if there are local transport links just outside your door, be sure to include this information somewhere on your site. It may seem obvious, but travellers research and make booking decisions based on the amenities on offer, so if you neglect to include a smaller detail, you’re not giving prospective guests the full picture of what you offer. Remember, people using the web to help inform their travel purchases are actively looking for information, so don’t be shy about giving it to them!

6. Helpful Content First, Keywords Second

Keywords are important, but they should never take the place of high quality content that is actually useful to its intended audience. Aim to create content that addresses your guests’ needs as a priority, incorporating carefully researched keywords as seamlessly as possible. With Google’s increasing intolerance for spammy sites that attempt to ‘game’ the system, you can’t go wrong by simply providing the information your guests are looking for.

7. Update Regularly

Google rewards sites with frequently updated content with higher rankings, while your guests are on the lookout for timely information. It follows, therefore, that regularly refreshing your site’s content is a must. How? By blogging, of course!

8. Build Links

A kind of online ‘word of mouth’, link building increases your website’s credibility in the eyes of the major search engines. The more high quality websites that link to your site, the more Google views you as an authority within your niche. Work on building relationships with businesses in your city that could sensibly link to you, and reap the benefits in more web traffic and better search rankings.

9. Use Analytics To Identify Winning Content

Tap into your analytics and find out which topics are generating traffic and bookings, and those which are performing less well. Can you identify a pattern in the kind of content your audience prefers? If so, great! It’s time to make more of it.

10. Test, Tweak and Repeat

Even the most successful content marketers didn’t get to the top of their game overnight. How did they get there? By constantly testing and tweaking their content until they found the winning formula that resonated best with their audience.

If you’re prepared to put the work in, conducting A/B testing will help you discover the headlines, layout and topic combinations that boost your engagement rates and those that don’t.

The days when content was simply there to fill space around a booking engine are long, long gone. Now content is the very starting point your guests are using to inform their travel research and decide where to spend their money.

How is your resort’s content strategy performing? Let us know in the comments below!