Utilizing user-generated content can be tremendously valuable to your hotel’s social media and website. People trust and prefer it over traditional advertising.
UGC (user-generated content) includes everything from social media photos and YouTube videos, to blog articles. In this article, we’ll look at how UGC can be utilized by your hotel to engage guests and enhance its appeal.
1. Influencer Marketing
Step one of elevating your hotel’s appeal is creating an inspiring visual narrative, and influencer marketing can help. Influencer marketing has proven its worth by improving engagement rates, increasing brand recognition and expanding reach. By finding passionate travel content creators to collaborate on brand content creation for you and engaging them as partners for marketing purposes – you can reach your target audience more efficiently.
To achieve maximum impact from an influencer marketing campaign, it is essential to develop a clear plan and set of goals. This will enable you to target specific platforms while tracking customer engagement as well as metrics such as likes, comments and shares.
One effective strategy to utilize user-generated content (UGC) is by including guest reviews and photos in your advertising campaigns. Such authentic pieces of information help prospective guests connect with your brand more easily.
UGC ads can also help improve SEO by including relevant keywords in their content that is directly tied to search queries. Incorporating such keywords helps increase website visibility and reach, increasing its likelihood of appearing among top results in search engines.
Make the most of user generated content (UGC) at your hotel by creating a dedicated Instagram account and offering guests spots around property that they can visit to share their experiences through UGC. Incentivizing interaction can also be achieved by offering prizes for creative posts created by guests.
In order to ensure the success of an influencer marketing campaign, it’s critical that carefully select influencers and negotiate an agreement between you and them that protects both parties – this contract should include terms like compensation, frequency of posts and expectations of both parties. It may also be helpful to provide influencers with unique trackable promo codes they can share with their followers – this way you can monitor campaign performance as it affects overall reach of your hotel.
2. Social Media
Social media user-generated content (UGC) can be an effective way of telling the story of your hotel on social media. UGC provides potential guests with an intimate glimpse inside, creating an immediate sense of familiarity. InBeat conducted research that shows people trust user-generated content over traditional advertisements from brands themselves.
UGC is highly shareable, which can increase reach and engagement on your social pages – especially as more and more people rely on them as sources of information.
UGC can also be an economical way to market your hotel, saving time and money with each post shared from guests’ photos or videos. Professional content creation can be expensive and time-consuming; using user-generated content saves both. Furthermore, sharing guest photos or videos saves legal headaches by always seeking consent beforehand and giving credit where it’s due.
Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter provide hotels with ways to display UGC in creative ways. By curating galleries or feeds that feature guest photos, videos, or feedback comments from guests – such as galleries of guest reviews – hotels can create visually appealing galleries and feeds which engage their guests while adding authenticity to their brand and creating a sense of community that draws customers and retains customers alike.
Integrating relevant keywords within UGC can also help your hotel increase its Search Engine Optimization (SEO), making it appear in searches for travel inspiration and helping it stand out against competitors. Furthermore, using UGC in paid advertising campaigns is an effective way of expanding reach and engaging a targeted audience of travelers.
Create “instagrammable” spaces within your hotel such as murals or scenic views from rooms, to encourage guests to post and tag your hotel in their photos and videos posted online, thus driving organic traffic and increasing conversions. This strategy can also increase organic search rankings.
3. Website
Hotel websites are the cornerstone of digital presence and should be taken seriously as such. A website serves more than simply to show rooms and amenities; it should provide an engaging experience that draws in prospective guests and builds brand loyalty. One key to creating an engaging hotel website experience lies in telling its story in such a way as to resonate with its target audience – user-generated content being an effective method of this.
Hotel guests love sharing their experiences, and are more likely to trust user-generated content (UGC) over professional material. UGC created by guests themselves can build deeper bonds. Hotel websites should keep this in mind, featuring UGC-rich visuals to draw in potential guests to book.
An hotel could use its website and social media pages to showcase local attractions that attract guests who may not know much about them, encouraging out-of-towners to explore. Furthermore, interactive content like augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR) could encourage guest engagement allowing visitors to experience being there in person.
UGC can be an invaluable asset to hotels looking to enhance existing photography and video content on their website, or to craft entirely new narratives. One popular approach is using a photo or video platform popular among your hotel’s demographic, then encouraging guests to post content using a particular hashtag on that platform – this way you’ll end up with an impressive gallery that truly encapsulates your property!
Keep in mind that hotel digital marketing strategies are an ongoing process, and it’s vitally important that regular performance analytics monitoring be done so as to make adjustments as needed. For instance, if a particular UGC content type consistently performs well on one platform then perhaps more resources should be poured into that platform. Furthermore, staying current on SEO trends and techniques will enable you to maximize online reach while targeting the appropriate audiences.
4. Email Marketing
Travelers looking for an exceptional hotel experience often want to share it with friends and followers on social media, resulting in unique guest content which reaches a wide audience and could influence booking decisions. Therefore, encouraging guests to post photos or videos from their visits at your hotel on social media platforms like Facebook is vitally important and could influence booking decisions directly or through email newsletters.
UGC can also be leveraged effectively in advertising campaigns such as paid search and social ads. According to marketing resource HubSpot, ads featuring user-generated content generate 5-times higher clickthrough rates than those without it; likely due to people trusting it more than traditional marketing content.
Integrating UGC into your advertising campaign also enhances SEO efforts, since Google takes into account the freshness and relevancy of online content when ranking sites in search results. Consider including new photos or videos of rooms, amenities or local attractions into your content strategy in order to increase visibility in search engines.
Include guest testimonials, photos and videos in your website and email marketing campaigns to add a personal touch and increase bookings at your hotel. Doing this will give potential guests more assurance in your services and accommodations – and may help increase booking rates!
Use of user-generated content (UGC) in hotel marketing is an effective way to bring authenticity and relatability to your brand, especially when potential guests research hotels for their upcoming trips. UGC may also help promote special offers or deals your hotel is currently offering; just make sure that only authentic UGC is used as fake or misleading material may damage its reputation.