Hoteliers have an incredible opportunity to attract travel shoppers online in 2022, and it will become more important than ever that your hotel maintains an effective presence across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.
Visual content works particularly well on Instagram and Snapchat is most appealing to a younger demographic. A carefully planned content calendar will increase your odds for success across all platforms.
1. Video Marketing
Video marketing is an effective strategy that has an impressive effect on user engagement, SEO and brand loyalty. It comes in various forms that enable hotels to tailor content specifically to different platforms and target audiences.
Hotels can create an air of authenticity by gathering customer reviews through video interviews, surveys or monitoring user engagement data.
Hotels can utilize videos to showcase amenities and attractions not available elsewhere, from rooftop bars with breathtaking views to exotic flower walls. Engaging, unique, and creative videos help attract more potential guests – and video is an effective way for showcasing these features!
Hotels can take advantage of social media trends by making their posts more entertaining and engaging for consumers. Content overload means consumers want something fresh every time they scroll past a hotel post or photo; otherwise they will quickly lose interest and move onto one of its competitors.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing strategies for hotels are essential to their overall success, allowing hotels to reach a wide array of potential customers via platforms like Facebook and Instagram, targeted ads on TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest, or targeted promotions across these channels.
Provide customers with an outlet to connect with your brand, providing hotels an opportunity for instant messaging customer service and visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat help hotels promote themselves by showcasing facilities and services available at your hotel.
As hotels must remain visible on all major social platforms to reach their targeted audiences and use each platform effectively as marketing channels, having a consistent tone across them all is paramount to successful engagement with users – as each user may react differently to similar content across different channels. Finally, each platform should have clear goals and strategies in order to maximize its potential and maximize business goals and strategies accordingly.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing is an intricate practice. Its aim is to craft highly engaging stories that reflect brand values and human experiences while meeting business goals through research, creativity and manual analysis.
Content strategies serve a number of functions in hotels: they inform, engage, inspire and convert guests. Their success ultimately depends upon whether or not these objectives have been accomplished successfully.
Content should include both short, snackable updates and long-form pieces to provide value and serve different functions in the marketing funnel. Shorter posts encourage engagement while longer articles provide deeper insight and search engine optimization (SEO).
An effective content strategy begins with an in-depth knowledge of your audience. By creating individual buyer personas, buyer personas provide you with insight necessary for crafting meaningful articles that provide answers, spark curiosity, and provoke action.
Hotel guests appreciate authentic experiences that stand out from the competition, from an Instagrammable rooftop bar view or quirky menu items, to exotic flower walls or quirky menu items. Social media posts featuring these images or videos will entice new customers and set your hotel apart from its competition.
4. Customer Service
Customer service is one of the key tenets of a hotel’s social media strategy. Guests want to feel like human beings when communicating with hotel representatives online, and get fast answers for any inquiries or issues that arise.
Today’s world of instant gratification makes people quick to leave businesses that do not treat them with care and respect, so hotels must prioritize customer service by taking measures to enhance it wherever possible.
Hotels should also ensure their customer service representatives are well trained to respond swiftly to guest inquiries, which they can do by providing employees with training materials and tools such as chatbots for answering guest queries quickly. By prioritizing exceptional customer service, hotels can establish loyal customers that keep coming back.
5. Live Streaming
Hotels should take notice of live streaming as a social media marketing trend, since it allows viewers to interact directly with content creators in real time, creating stronger bonds between viewers and content producers and making viewers feel like an integral part of what is being produced.
Live video streaming was initially created as a tool for gaming platforms to showcase their gameplay, but has since become an invaluable platform for influencers, musicians, and talk show hosts alike. Furthermore, live streaming is being utilized across a variety of industries–such as gambling–as a means of showcasing charismatic personalities and drawing in large audiences.
Hoteliers can utilize live streaming to showcase the ambience and amenities available at their establishment to potential guests, while creating an interactive experience which may lead to increased bookings. A questionnaire was devised to study the effect of e-commerce live-streaming on customer purchase intention using SOR conceptual framework and Five-Factor Model theory; promotion incentives like discounts or special offers served as physical stimulants which enhanced purchase intentions on live-streaming platforms.
6. Mobile Marketing
Social media platforms, especially Instagram, are increasingly used by travellers as an avenue for researching accommodation options. Hotels should therefore keep their social media platforms updated with relevant information ranging from special offers to room categories and availability.
With billions of users on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok providing hotels with unique marketing opportunities – it is crucial they utilize them. One such channel is Snapchat which enables users to record and share content that instantly disappears after sharing it – providing high privacy levels that appeals to younger audiences.
Hotels must remain true to their brand image and personality across every platform they use – Instagram mustn’t appear quirky while formality dominates on websites; and vice versa. Doing this ensures their digital voice resonates, connects, and compels visitors – ultimately this drives bookings.
7. Search Engine Optimization
Even as digital marketing evolves, SEO remains an effective trend hotels shouldn’t dismiss. By harnessing this nuanced form of digital alchemy, your hotel can achieve visibility that opens doors of opportunity around the globe.
SEO is all about creating the highest quality content to address the needs and wants of your audience, so your hotel should prioritize quality over quantity when creating SEO-rich pages for their target market. Instead of writing novel-length blocks of text, try weaving keywords into page titles, headers, body text and headers – though being overzealous with keywords could actually backfire!
Millennials and Gen Z consumers are using social media platforms like TikTok more frequently to search for products, brands, restaurants and attractions, including those locally. Coupled with voice search usage from consumers, hotel marketers should integrate SEO keywords into their overall social media strategies as soon as possible – infographics or original research are great ways of including SEO keywords while simultaneously producing shareable content that’s also shareable on social media.
8. Email Marketing
Hotel industry trends change quickly, and social media and email marketing are critical tools for drawing guests and driving bookings. Therefore, hotels must keep pace with these developments to stay ahead of competition and remain ahead of trends.
Snapchat
A great way to engage millennials and other travellers is with Snapchat. This ephemeral app enables brands to create custom filters which can be superimposed over photos and videos; hotels can leverage these to evoke FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), such as adding captions such as ‘you wish you were here’.
Hotel marketers should set clear goals for their marketing campaigns to align their content with the overall vision of their business and ensure it resonates, connects and compels audiences online. Furthermore, hotel marketers must update all online channels with current information – customers who click a promotion for a hotel spa day package only to discover it has sold out will be disappointed by such actions.