As more travelers are inspired to start booking rooms at hotels, searches will begin to rise. As a result, it’s become more important than ever that your hotel maintains a strong online presence.
NB: This is an article from Travel Media Group
Most may only think of this a having an intuitive, mobile-friendly website with up-to-date information, or ensuring all the information you provide to OTAs is accurate. However, covering just those two areas will not be enough to gain the attention of travelers. In order to succeed and have a competitive advantage in the market, hoteliers need to utilize social media.
With platforms like Facebook and Instagram that boast millions of daily users, there are plenty of reasons that social media marketing is a worthwhile investment. Once you understand the many ways travelers engage with content, you’ll be able to build a strategy that works for your property and ultimately boosts hotel revenue.
Guests Understand Content Visually
Visual content is processed by the human brain faster than text, as around 50% of the surface of our brains is devoted to understanding visuals. As a result, we have a better recall of visual information as opposed to text, and users online are more compelled to engage with content that catches their eye. We live in an information age and users on the internet wade through thousands of posts and articles each day. That’s why text-based forms of advertisement online get less engagement: a potential guest is more likely to stop and look at your post if you’ve generated a simple, attractive visual aid. Even if aspiring travelers don’t click right away, if they see it multiple times over the course of a week or two weeks, they’re more likely to remember your property over a competitor.
An imperative part of this process to remember is the repetition of seeing a hotel’s name on social media multiple times over the course of a couple of weeks. It is a careful line to walk between a steady flow of posts versus overloading your audience with stimulus, but it’s necessary to boost brand awareness. In fact, 72% of consumers prefer to learn about a product or service through video as opposed to text whenever possible. Users also spend more time on a website that includes a video around 88% of the time, which will improve their overall impression of your hotel in their memory.
Brand Awareness
Without a strong, active social media presence, your hotel will fall away from the attention of guests who would earn you valuable conversions. Ads and posts display on a user’s feed based on that user’s browsing history, and most everyone who uses the internet on a casual, day-to-day basis leaves a digital footprint behind them. Social algorithms take users’ data – search result clicks, website visits, even liked or re-shared posts – and aggregate it into an experience, further identifying them through their likes and dislikes. Their level of engagement helps websites define them, and helps know what posts to show to ensure the company behind it has the highest chance of catching their attention. However, none of this can happen if you don’t have posts you’re sharing on social media. On platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the algorithm pays significant preference to recency in posts – which means that your social media marketing strategy cannot just be for one or two months. It’s a prolonged commitment that will make all the difference for your hotel in the long run.
We published a resource for hotels about how brand awareness can help you maximize your ROI on social media posts, which includes useful advice for how you can implement stronger brand awareness strategies for your social media.
Increased Potential for Reach
Users average around two and a half hours on social media each day, and around 49% of the world’s population browses the internet regularly. This creates a huge potential for your hotel to reach exactly who you need to with tailored ads geared at specific regions and demographics. Your goals with social media can be twofold: one group of regular posts to build and maintain brand awareness will work wither another group of posts targeted at inspired potential guests. Getting these viewers excited about traveling by posting engaging, creative posts will increase the chances that they’ll book a stay with you.
Having a consistent social media presence increases the trust your followers and future guests have in you as a business. Additionally, if they have a question about your property or an issue they want to address in private, they may not reach for the phone right away. Many online users will try to find you on social media to voice their concerns through direct messaging or mentions, and seeing your active social profile will help identify you as a business they can trust to keep in touch.
Social media is a valuable element of your hotel marketing toolkit, but making occasional, one-off posts related to deals or services isn’t going to be enough. Building a solid social media presence establishes your brand in the mind of travelers and generates more revenue for your property.
