A strong hotel website can play a major role in the success of any hospitality company. If you’re looking for ways to improve yours, consider how you can develop and share new content on a regular basis. This will give people more reason to engage with your site often.
Hotel blogging is a particularly smart option to consider. The following points will help you better understand why:
Hotel Blogging Allows You to Highlight Key Local Features
A hotel website should obviously indicate why a person would choose to stay at your hotel in the first place. This involves highlighting key amenities and local features.
However, a website alone may not be sufficient to highlight all local attractions, events, and hotel amenities you wish to cover.
There are many reasons this is the case. For instance, perhaps a major music festival or similar seasonal event is coming to the area. It wouldn’t make sense to highlight a seasonal event on your website (unless it occurs at the same time every year, and has for long enough that you can count on it returning every year). A blog gives you the opportunity to highlight such attractions.
That’s just one example. The main point to remember is that your blog expands upon your ability to appeal to potential customers.
Audiences Will Respond to Your Blog Emotionally
It’s no secret vacations can make people happy. What some don’t realize, however, is that the experience of planning a vacation is in many cases as enjoyable as the actual experience of taking one. Research confirms it.
Thus, you should maintain a regular blog that highlights the various reasons people may want to stay at your properties. While the website itself may serve a generally practical need, helping potential guests know what types of rooms you have, what your rates are, and more, a blog can give them ideas about how to spend their time while away. This has a stronger emotional effect.
Blogs Give People a Reason to Return
You want users engaging with your website regularly. Why? One, it will keep your brand in their mind, ensuring they’re more likely to consider your properties the next time they take a trip.
Perhaps more importantly, when a potential guest has reasons to visit your site often, they may be more inclined to book a room directly through it, instead of heading to a third party online travel agency to do so. This is key to avoiding the increasingly high commission fees OTAs charge.
That’s why you need to post content that gives people a reason to return to your site numerous times. Again, if it only offers practical information, once they’ve done their initial research, it’s not likely a user will visit your site again that often, unless they need to confirm a detail they forgot.
By posting new, fresh content through your hotel blog on a regular basis, you make your website a destination worth revisiting. This boosts brand awareness and helps you refocus attention away from OTAs and back to your site.
Of course, it’s important to make sure the content you post is genuinely strong. A blog can’t deliver value to your hotel if it doesn’t deliver value to its readers. Knowing this, you may want to coordinate with hospitality digital marketing experts to develop a blogging strategy that maximizes your return-on-investment.
