Content marketing is here to stay. In fact, it’s an industry which is predicted to reach an estimated value of $300 billion by 2019.
Since content is the king of both present and future digital marketing, it’s no surprise that marketers are spending a sizeable chunk of their budgets on blogs and posts to engage their customers. Unfortunately, it’s a long term marketing strategy which is both costly and takes a while to prove itself in terms of return on investment.
The good news? With a little care and forward thinking you can reduce your spending while still producing high quality content that informs and entertains your guests and drives traffic and bookings. Here are 3 smart tips you can get started on today.
Identify Your Target Readers Before You Start Each Piece Of Content
In the effort to supply your website with a continual stream of fresh content, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of what you’re actually trying to achieve with the content you create. Your hotel’s content has a purpose, namely to nurture your leads and turn browsing travel shoppers into guests. If you’re not totally clear about who you’re writing it for, it’s going to fall flat, no matter how much time you spend on it.
The takeaway here is: start with guest personas first. Every piece of content you create should be designed to answer and address your guests’ specific needs, wants and concerns as travellers. If it’s not, you’re simply wasting your time and resources.
Consider Evergreen Content
Make your content work harder for you by focusing on creating content you can reuse longer term. While some blogs (such as those highlighting a one-off local event) can only be used once, other pieces of content have longer term value and can even be repurposed into videos or updated slightly to create a new post.
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t aim for uniqueness wherever possible, but drawing on more general “evergreen” content assets is a great way to publish content that resonates with your guests while reducing your spending from time to time.
Get To Grips With Analytics
If you’re doing it right, you’re using multiple platforms to promote your content to the widest audience possible, including landing pages, social media, paid ads, tracking tools and SEO tactics. Great.
But not all these tactics are equal in terms of ROI.
Delve into Google Analytics to identify the channels which are delivering the best results when it comes to driving traffic to your hotel website or blog. You’re then in a position to reduce expenses that aren’t delivering, or at least analyse why they might be falling short. Before investing in multiple monitoring and analytics tools, remember Google Analytics is pretty solid unless you need something super in depth. That way, your budget will remain in check.
How do you curb your spending in a time of content marketing dominance? Let us know in the comments below!
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