This is part one of a two part series exploring the role of content in hospitality revenue generation. This first part focuses on producing and leveraging owned content. The second part in our series focuses on user-generated content (UGC).

Digital content has become an integral part of marketing strategies for businesses across all industries, and this includes hospitality. As traditional forms of advertising have become less effective, delivering engaging and relevant content has become the number one way to garner attention and build an audience.

This is an especially powerful tactic in the world of travel where the experience is everything. Let’s explore how content can help increase revenue for your hospitality business, including some best practices for creating compelling content.

Establishing Your Brand Positioning

Original content is a great way to position your brand in your market(s) and differentiate yourself from your competitors. By producing high-quality content that reflects your brand's values and personality, you can attract a loyal following of customers and brand evangelists  who are more likely to choose your hotel or restaurant over your competitors. This can lead to increased revenue and repeated business.

Building Trust and Credibility

In the hospitality industry, building trust and credibility is essential to attracting and retaining customers. Content marketing can help you establish your expertise and domain authority in the travel industry by providing your target audience with the three Is: information, insights and inspiration to your target audience.

• Information: Equip your audience with useful details about their excursion such as itineraries, tips, suggestions and other useful resources.

• Insights: Leverage your travel knowledge to offer up unique perspectives and opinions that cannot be found elsewhere while your audience researches.

• Inspiration: Get your audience excited for an upcoming adventure or stoke the travel bug within them to give them an idea of what they’re missing to create extra demand.

By producing well-researched, informative and inspirational content, you can build trust and excitement with potential customers and position yourself as a thought leader in your market.

Increasing Brand Awareness

Creating shareable content formatted for a variety of channels is a great way to increase brand awareness and reach new audiences. This is especially useful when opening a new franchise, branch or entering a new market.

By producing content that is engaging, informative, and entertaining, you can attract a wider audience to your website and social media channels. This can help increase your revenue by introducing your brand to new customers who may not have been aware of your business before.

Driving Traffic and Conversions

Content marketing can also help drive traffic to your website and increase conversions. In addition to driving traffic via social channels, by producing content that is optimized for search engines, you can attract more organic traffic to your website and increase your visibility in search engine results pages.

Additionally, by including calls to action in your content, you can encourage travelers to take action, such as signing up for your newsletter or loyalty program or booking a room or making a reservation at your restaurant.

5 Tips for Creating Engaging Content

Now that we've explored the benefits of content marketing for the hospitality industry, let's take a look at some tips for creating engaging content:

1. Know your audience: Before creating content, it's important to understand your target audience and what they're looking for. This can help you create content that is relevant and engaging to your target audience. Go beyond general demographic information and build ideal customer personas based on ambitions, interests and tendencies.

2. Be consistent: Consistency is key when it comes to your messaging. Whether you're publishing blog posts, social media updates or website copy, it's important to maintain a consistent position, tone and voice as well as publishing schedule to keep your audience engaged.

3. Use visual elements: Visual elements, such as images and videos, can help make your content more engaging and shareable, especially in the travel and entertainment sectors. Be sure to include relevant visual elements in your content to make an emotional connection with your audience. As a bonus, this type of content typically performs well with social media algorithms, garnering more impressions.

4. Optimize for search engines: To increase your visibility in search engine results pages, it's important to optimize your content for search engines. This includes using relevant keywords and meta descriptions in your content as well as generating relevant backlinks to increase your domain authority. It’s also important to consider your local market(s) when producing content to ensure you appear in localized searches.

5. Provide value: Ultimately, the key to creating effective content is to provide value to your audience. Whether it's by providing useful information or entertaining or inspiring your audience, your content should be focused on providing value to your target audience.

By following these simple tips for creating effective content, you can create a content marketing strategy that drives results and helps you attract and retain customers, grow your business, and achieve your business goals.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can get your hospitality business in front of a wider audience, reach out to us!