6 Crucial Questions To Guide Your Social Media Strategy

Posted on Mar 29th 2017 in Social Media

Social media has been a core component of every brand’s online strategy for years now, but as the world of networks and apps continues to evolve, competition for your audience’s attention is fierce.

In a bid to get noticed, many marketers are striving to juggle more and more channels and tactics than ever before – an approach which is draining, expensive and simply not sustainable long term. The real key to driving results on social media is to aim for a strategy that strikes a balance between the needs of your guests and your hotel’s specific business goals.

To help you build this perfectly harmonized social campaign, here are some key questions to help guide your content creation efforts.

1. What Are Your Goals?

This one may be obvious, but it’s impossible to put together a coherent strategy if you have no clear end objective. Whether you want to create a thriving, engaged online community, drive referral traffic to your property’s website or boost bookings, your goals should form the basis of your strategy, guiding the decisions you make one step at a time. Set realistic end goals that can be measured, as well as smaller benchmark goals so you can assess and refine your efforts as you go.

2. How Will You Measure Results?

As mentioned above, once you’ve set your hotel’s social media objectives, you’ll need a way to continually assess how near you are to achieving them.

To do this, it’s important to delve beyond the most obvious metrics. For example, if your primary aim is to boost the flow of traffic to your hotel website, a quick glance at your social referral figures won’t give you the full story of how your campaign is progressing. Dig a little deeper to see how these prospective guests are actually interacting with your content once they land on your website. Pay particular attention to your site’s best performing pages, the average number of pages guests are visiting during their visits, time spent interacting with your content and of course, conversion rate.

3. Who Is Your Audience?

If you want to engage your audience and keep them coming back for more, you need to get a grip on their key travel interests, needs and pain points.

A great way to get started is to define who your ideal guest groups are by creating guest personas – a loose picture of the kinds of people that make up your target audience. There are several effective ways to do this, including digging into your website analytics, conducting guest surveys and chatting directly to your reception team. Analyzing this important data will help you decide which channels are most important for reaching your target audience, as well as the content topics which are most likely to score engagement points.

4. What Do You Want Your Audience To Know About Your Hotel?

Social media gives you an amazing platform to showcase your hotel and demonstrate to your guests everything that’s unique about your hotel and the value you offer.

Don’t waste the opportunity to tell the story of your business. Leave the overly promotional content behind and bring some personality to your pages by taking a more human, relatable approach to your interactions.

5. How Often Will You Post?

If you want to generate engagement and build a strong social community, creating a consistent posting schedule is key. That doesn’t mean you have to post ten times a day- it’s all about finding the right balance for your particular audience. Ultimately, you want to pop up regularly in your guests’ news feeds, but not to the point that they’re rolling their eyes each time they see your hotel’s name. The idea is to keep your brand fresh in their minds without overwhelming them with a constant barrage of irrelevant content.

Put together a social content production plan that clearly lays out how often you’ll be posting to each network, and stick to it. Don’t forget to experiment with the times of day that are best to reach your guests too.

6. What Kind Of Content Mix Will You Use?

Of course, all your groundwork will count for nothing if you haven’t carefully considered the specific strategies and tools you need to execute your campaign. From live video and chats, to paid ads, contests and image based posts.

Some tactics that you could include are influencer content, paid ads, video and live chats. The most successful campaigns will generally include a mixture of tactics to maximise your reach, demonstrate your commitment to customer care and keep your audience engaged.

What questions do you ask yourself to inform your hotel’s social media strategy? Let us know in the comments below!