Can you believe it? We are just a sleep away from the month of holidays, fun trips, relaxing getaways and quality family time. Oh, August, where have you been for so long?
If you have already planned your holiday or you are still looking for offers, good luck and have a blast! I can't help you much with this post, but what I'm aiming to do today, is cater for the people who do the dirty work for all of us to enjoy a fantastic time away.
Hola, Tourism and Hospitality businesses! Are you here already? I'm about to give 5 tips on what type of content makes a successful marketing strategy and how to use it to leave a really good impression in your customers.
1. Give your customers a platform to share their experiences
Turn a small section of your website into a mini TripAdvisor. Let your customers exchange information on various hotels and holiday packages, inclusive of recreation activities. This way you bring value to the consumers with your content and they are more likely to come back even if it is just to look at reviews. After a few times, they will feel tempted enough to make a booking. Furthermore, this is a brilliant strategy to increase your Google ranking. Have you noticed, most times, when you look up a restaurant or a hotel on the search engine, the first couple of sites are actually those filled with customer reviews, usually TripAdvisor and Zomato? This is so because there's a number of people coming to the site to place reviews and even more to read them. As you can imagine, the traffic is huge. Google likes traffic. Wouldn't you want the same for your website?
One more thing, don't be scared of negative reviews. Instead, be proactive and always respond in a calm, polite and assertive manner. Research has shown that an unhappy customer is 30% more likely to re-visit a place if the management responded adequately to their complaint.
2. Inspire through visual content
Tourism and Hospitality is one of the industries where visual content is an absolute must. 80% of people respond quicker to the attractive things they see, rather than read. Yes, an engaging copy will never grow old, but there's a reason why they say "a picture speaks a thousand words". I mean, who wouldn't want to be on a beach, in front of a crystal blue lagoon, with a fancy cocktail in hand? I know I find it hard to resist such temptation when I see an advert.
Professional photography here plays a big role. Everything must look impeccable and luxurious. Low quality pictures can, quite frankly, ruin your campaign and seriously damage your reputation. If you don't work with freelance photographers and don't buy stock photography you can find yourself in big trouble for messing with copyrights.
3. Create a quiz
Make it fun for people to come to your website and social media channels. Tourism and Hospitality industry is similar to Entertainment. Creating and posting a quiz for your Facebook fans or Twitter followers can bring a lot of visitors, reactions and shares. This means more people are talking about you and your content is spreading on the web. You can title your quiz "Where should you go on holiday this year?" or "What city best matches your personality?". There are many options and creating a quiz is far from difficult.
4. Invest in an app
Apart from knowing what to put online for your consumers, it is also very important to know how to distribute it. If you are a travel agent or a hotel owner, do invest in an app. It's not just because it's modern and everybody does it. It enables your customers to have much better experience using your services. Apps provide all the useful information a traveller or a holiday goer would need without much effort. App users value such investment and their appreciation translates into higher sales figures, giving you a good ROI.
5. Put on your A-game on Twitter
If you've not been tweeting hard, it's time to start! Although most of your content shares will almost always come from Facebook, being active and effective on Twitter is what is going to give you more satisfied customers. Post travel updates, weather or accident alerts and all sorts of other condensed but vital information for your clients to access easily. Make sure you can always reply promptly to tweets, mentions and direct messages, because this is what is going to set you apart from the competition.
Well, arrangements for summer holidays are almost over (except for last minute people, like moi), but it's never too soon to start planning for Christmas and pre-festive getaways. It's certainly the right time for all of you, Tourism and Hospitality busy bees, to start putting together and promoting those sweet winter deals. This post can act as a beginner guide for your next content marketing strategy and if you need some more advice, hola at me!
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