In a travel market that’s more competitive than ever, the way your hotel’s brand makes guests feel can mean the difference between winning repeat bookings or losing out to a competitor.
Every key marketing touch point in the booking journey is a chance to forge a relationship with your guests and enhance the customer experience.
So, it’s essential to be mindful of guest experience, from first contact to booking, and stay active in striving to improve it every step of the way. Here’s how to get started.
Fine Tune Your Content Strategy
To use content to boost customer experience, it’s time to have an honest rethink about what your content is for. Are you still creating content simply to push guests towards the booking page?
The most effective content builds trust, earns SEO-boosting back-links and is genuinely useful and engaging enough to bring your audience back time and time again.
How can you be sure you’re creating this kind of content? Turn to your guests.
When you talk to your loyal and prospective guests, you uncover their needs, wants and concerns. You reveal the kind of questions they have about your property and its locale. Your content, if it’s doing its job, should answer those questions.
By making best-answer content, you’ll be doing everything you can to enhance your hotel’s visibility in the SERPs and improve its reputation both with Google and your customers.
Create Content for Your Guests
How often do you publish blog posts aimed at your current guests? Content designed to help them get the most out of their stays, or addressing guest pain points with your property or local area? Doing so is one powerful way you can demonstrate that you care about your guests and improve the customer experience through your marketing. This is a great way to market to potential guests too – after all, as you show current guests at your hotel that you’re committed to giving them the best holiday experience possible, prospective guests getting ready to book their own breaks are watching too.
Create A Seamless Social Media Experience
Social media is in the unique position of being both a promotional and customer service channel rolled into one. It’s where people who have never heard of your hotel rub shoulders with devoted followers and disgruntled guests with problems, and yet in most businesses, it’s far more likely to be considered the responsibility of the marketing department.
Your hotel can improve the guest experience on social media by making it a business policy to respond quickly to questions, posting regularly and by remembering to leave the promotional posts on the backburner, start conversations and embrace the “social” aspect of the channel as it was originally intended to be used.
When your hotel’s marketing and customer service efforts align, you’ll turn travel shoppers into guests and guests into raving fans. Remember, the loyal guests who are most impressed by your customer service will do some of your advertising legwork for you for free in the form of invaluable word of mouth marketing.
What do you think? How is your hotel using marketing to enhance the guest experience? Let us know in the comments below!
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