Content in social media channels, blogs and websites is essential for the online presence of your business.

In fact, this attracts your future customers and contributes to keeping the clients you already have.

1. Choose your social media channels

The platforms where people share their experiences and travels are many and various. It’s not necessary to be everywhere, just figure out your place and find your target audience.

2. The content can be emails, blog posts, reviews, photos, videos or any other type of content.

These are some of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website and the social media accounts of your business, eventually leading to reservations at your hotel. Speaking of travel content, don’t measure it only in the number of different websites and social media networks you use. Your online presence has to be of high quality, engaging and, as a result of that, bringing a lot of benefits to your business.

3. The five stages people go through when planning a trip.

The stages identified by Google are five. We will briefly introduce them to you now but we’ll go into detail in a follow-up publication.

• - Dreaming

• - Planning

• - Booking

• - Experience

• - Sharing

At four out of the five stages people don’t know where and when they are going to travel and stay at. Sometimes they don’t know exactly what they want and, of course, whom to give their money to. If your message to them is “Buy now” or “Save money”, then you must know that this approach is becoming less and less effective. Provide your potential customers with valuable information to help with their journey and this will bring you success. Anything that sounds like advertisement is of no use to the consumer, it doesn’t engage them and it doesn’t generate sales.

4. The important thing is to make sharing experiences simple.

You have to be easy to find in social media! Come up with your own hashtags that people can add, create a custom location in the social networking sites, add social media icons to a visible position in your website. These are the small things that will transform your customers into a content generating machine.

5. You don’t need a big budget.

Stop worrying about where to find the resources to get content. The tourism industry provides both enough space for creating content and audience that is ready to consume it. Irrespective of your location, hotel or services offered, there are numerous subjects you can write about, beautiful photos you can take and inspiring videos you can capture. Besides that, travelling has always been a fascinating topic that people like to watch, listen or read about. Part of the good presentation is finding which content you’re best at and which type of content is most successful in this industry. Ask your customers if they like that content, create online surveys and check on your competition in order to identify what people really want to see.

6. Quality over quantity

You have to create a lot of content for your hotel, but never at the expense of quality.

Nowadays people are extremely sensitive when it comes to online content and quite knowingly dismiss anything of a low quality. For better or worse, the Internet is full of websites that don’t present hotels and locations well and this is exactly the reason why you need to think of an easy way to stand out in the crowd. If customers come across bad content in your online channels, this can make them give up on your hotel forever, even if it has received good reviews from visitors.

In the travel and tourism industry high quality content can be a strong competitive advantage. Since all hotels offer comparatively equal services, people tend to book hotels that have incredible reviews, post regular (and interesting) publications on their website or blog and have more active social media channels.