Google’s ‘Hummingbird’ switch up has made it more important than ever to continually create high quality content to get noticed in search results and drive traffic to your resort’s website.
Great content is an extremely effective tool for driving traffic and bookings, but how can you be sure your content marketing efforts are hitting the mark?
Here are some simple rules to work by.
Create Compelling Headlines
On a web flooded with free content, if a headline doesn’t grab your attention you discard it in an instant and move on to the next thing that catches your eye.
As a content creator, you have just moments to capture your guests’ attention and generate that click, whether your headline appears in SERPs, a tweet or in a Facebook post. Make your all-important first impression count by creating simple, concise but magnetic headlines that promise the content will answer a question or offer some valuable information to the user if only they keep reading.
Remember Who You’re Writing For
Successful hotels know their guests. They understand their wants, needs and pain points. To ensure you publish useful content, use this knowledge about your guests as the basis of everything you create.
Constantly put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself “Is this something our guests need to know?” or “Would they find this information interesting?”
Keep it Concise and Coherent
In the digital realm, solid walls of text are a huge turn off. Entice and retain readers by breaking your content up into short sentences and paragraphs, and make use of subtitles, bullet points and list formats wherever suitable.
Distribute onto Multiple Social Networks
Don’t assume that your guests are only on Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest is the fastest growing social media platform on the web and YouTube has more than one billion unique hits every month. Take advantage of these huge audiences by publishing content to multiple social media channels and spread word about your resort far and wide.
Convert Readers to Guests
Whether the goal of your content marketing is to collect email subscribers, encourage Facebook Likes or to drive bookings directly, you need to include at least one compelling call to action to tell readers what to do next. In a blog article the best place for the CTA is usually at the end of the article, where you can include a sentence or two letting the reader know how they can further their engagement with your property. In a YouTube video you have a number of options, including CTAs in the video annotations, directly beneath the video in the description box and even spoken within the content of the video itself.
Does your content marketing campaign follow these basic principles? Let us know in the comments below.
