How can hotels use event content for marketing?

In November 2011, Google announced that it would add content freshness to its ranking algorithm. This basically means that fresh content will be ranked higher than content that is theoretically outdated.

The above measures have a huge impact on the concept of "timeless" content, which some people believe will always be favored by search engines.

Google's behavior in adjusting its algorithm means that we need to rethink our search results. Even if you don't enter a specific requirement in your search query, you may want to get search results that are more relevant and fresh, because the relevance of certain types of content may decrease over time.

The above situation brings a new problem to hotel owners: they believe that their hotels do not have a lot of content to publish on the website, so the new indicator of freshness that affects hotel rankings cannot create an advantage for them.

Some hoteliers start an official blog, but they quickly run out of ideas for blog content creation, and they don’t have the time and patience to execute a well-planned content strategy.

However, there is one type of content that is almost inexhaustible, and that is content about activities.

Cities around the world host a variety of events throughout the year, whether they are large or small. No matter where you are in the world, there are always certain events taking place in certain areas, whether it is a small party or a large music festival that lasts for several days.

A good hotel manager is always aware of all the activities going on in his area and will work to make the most of this information. The hotel can share this with guests who are looking for activities during their stay and then incorporate this information into blog posts. Information about activities can also show potential guests a vibrant and interesting travel destination.

If you want to ensure that there is always fresh content on your hotel website, one effective way is to write content about upcoming events on your hotel website. You can also create informative pages about important events so that people will like your hotel website. If people like your hotel website, it will undoubtedly be favored by search engines, so the above approach can achieve a win-win effect.

• Competitive events: events, marathons, annual competitions, etc.;

• Concerts, festivals and trade fairs;

• Conferences and seminars;

• Natural phenomena: solar and lunar eclipses, the Northern Lights, etc.

There’s a lot more you can do with activity information, and some strategies are clearly useful but aren’t being fully utilized by some hoteliers around the world.

example

Let's assume we are running a hotel in the Lake Como area in northern Italy.

Recently there is news that the famous band 30 Seconds to Mars will perform live in Milan, Italy on November 2, 2013, which is good news for Milan.

In fact, this is good news for everyone and business near Milan, including the hypothetical hotel mentioned above. Fans will come to Milan to see the live show, they will cross 1,000 miles just to enjoy a magical night. But if these fans can enjoy a 2-3 day vacation in Italy after watching the concert, why would they rush to leave?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could talk directly to the fans of 30 Seconds to Mars and offer them a vacation at one of our hotels?

We can take action right away.

Using Facebook to Target Audiences

According to data from March 2013, Facebook currently has more than 1.1 billion registered accounts, and all users of the social networking site are ready to listen to the message conveyed by the brand. If you market through Facebook, you can connect with the brand's target customers.

If you can use Facebook's PPC advertising program in the right way, it will be a very powerful tool, which is better than Google AdWords in some ways. We can create new ads on the Facebook advertising page, and brands undoubtedly need to have a Facebook account.

We will create an ad, and all clicks on this ad will be redirected to a specific page we set up on the hotel website for a certain event.

The image below shows the more interesting element, which is choosing your audience:

First, we precisely defined the interests of our target audience, whose common interest was 30 Seconds to Mars.

Who are more likely to go to Italy to watch a concert? The answer may be fans from neighboring countries, such as Austria, Switzerland and Croatia.

We can instantly see how many visitors are likely to see our ad, and the answer is 880,000.

After choosing your target audience, the next thing to do is to set a budget for your ad.

I suggest you try a small-scale advertising campaign first, instead of investing a lot of money and hoping for miracles, you should take a reasonable and safe approach. First, you can set a budget of $5-10 per day. According to CPC calculation, the above budget should bring you an average of 10-40 daily visitors.

You need to monitor the behavior of these new visitors to your website and analyze what they do after opening your landing page. If the bounce rate of your website is higher than 90%, then you need to act cautiously.

“People often confuse bounce rate with exit rate, which is an Internet marketing term used for website traffic analysis. It refers to the proportion of visitors who leave the website immediately after arriving (rather than continuing to browse other pages on the same website).”

A low bounce rate means that your visitors are interested in what you have to offer and are looking for more information about your hotel. A high bounce rate means that your targeting strategy is not successful, the ad copy is not optimized, and/or the product on the website landing page is not sticky.

Analyze and define your audience

Before you commit to and start investing money in Facebook marketing, one of the most important things you can do is to define your audience. You must define the characteristics of most of your customers:

• Who are your customers?

• Where are they from?

• How old are they?

• What is the purpose of their trip? Are they travelling for business or on vacation?

• What are their main interests?

You should be able to answer the above questions in all situations, and you need to have the above information at your fingertips at all times.

In addition, you should also separate satisfied customers from dissatisfied customers and analyze their characteristics separately.

Are younger users more likely to post negative reviews, and is there nothing you can do about it? In my opinion, you can focus on attracting more mature customers first.

Auditing your hotel website

Before you start experimenting with Facebook PPC advertising, you must make sure your hotel website is well prepared to convert visitors into customers.

If the hotel website is very old and does not provide simple booking options or does not have some interactive content, then it is meaningless even if the hotel official website gets traffic. (Wing compiled)

via: traveldaily