As part of our new Hospitality Marketing Unlocked series, we’re breaking down key areas to focus on in your hotel’s bounceback strategy.
This week, we take a closer look at how to create a hotel content marketing strategy that educates and raises awareness of new safety policies or procedures at your hotel, reassuring customers into placing a booking.
Ensure your hotel is front of mind
Before posting anything sales-focused, you’ll need to ensure your audience are ready to hear from you. If you’ve continued with content marketing over the past couple of months, your hotel will have maintained a good relationship with your customers. This means they’ll be ready and waiting to hear about your reopening news.
However, if you haven’t communicated with your audience since lockdown began, you’ll need to warm them up again. Focus on encouraging customers to reconnect with your brand and latest news, before focusing too heavily on bookings.
Develop a content framework
Creative content marketing can build up trust and excitement amongst customers before you reopen, conveying important information to potential guests in an engaging way. By devising a content framework, you’ll be able to create a strategy and map out in advance when you will release certain information or special promotions.
In your content framework, consider popular channels you may want to use to connect with your target audience.
With more than 24 million users in the UK, Instagram is an extremely visual social platform to use as a channel.
It’s perfect for posting photos of luscious hotel gardens or scrumptious afternoon teas, to tempt viewers’ taste buds and entice them back.
Newer channels such as Instagram Stories also open up alternative ways to engage with an online audience, from posting polls to Q&As, you can gain real-time insight from your audience on how they’re feeling about your hotel reopening.
Promote ‘booking with confidence’
Following the Coronavirus pandemic, many businesses within the travel industry are now offering a book with confidence guarantee to customers to encourage more reservations.
These new policies allow customers to move or cancel a booking, with a no quibble refund, if a trip can’t be taken due to the virus.
If your hotel is willing to offer potential customers no-quibble refunds due to the virus, a marketing campaign will help both raise awareness and boost confidence in your business.
Are you safe, clean and legal?
There’s also the Quality in Tourism’s new ‘Safe, Clean and Legal’ accreditation that has been designed with the Hotel Booking Agents Association in a bid to kickstart the accommodation and events industries.
The regulated accreditation is awarded to hotels that meet or exceed minimum set standards across a wide range of factors that have become paramount following the Covid-19 outbreak. Focusing on standards of hygiene, cleanliness and protocols, the accreditation is designed to drive confidence among guests and employers.
To reassure customers you are a ‘covid-ready’ hotel, it is definitely worth applying to get your business ‘Safe, Clean and Legal’ accredited before including promoting this in your hotel’s content marketing strategy.
In our latest whitepaper ‘How to get your hotel ready for reopening within the current government guidelines and COVID restrictions’, we delve deeper into how to create a content marketing strategy that repurposes your new safety policies into impactful content.
Why this will benefit your hotel
Customers are looking for reassurance to book at holiday. By repositioning your health and safety policies as engaging content, you’ll be able to:
- Inform your marketing strategies
- Intrigue and satisfy customer quieres
- Increase bookings
- Use targeted advertising to attract audiences
Sound good?
Download our free whitepaper today to get the inspiration and insight you need to identify your USPs and define a hotel experience that attracts staycationers.
