There seems a lot of disagreement about whether blogging is still effective in the days of micro-blogging sites like Twitter and age of social media like Facebook.
We have been managing hotel blogs, and are achieving good results through a well thought out strategy. And this is the key for hotel internet marketing; you need a plan to get somewhere.
We are managing various hotel blogs, for different kinds of product. All of them have a unique image and approach. It is important the blog connects with your guests.
We creatively target local attractions, events, shopping, dining and nightlife tips, etc to provide the hotel’s clients with an idea of what they can do in the destination. It is important to give your hotel blog a personal touch and informal style.
For example, among the hotel blogs we manage are:
We cover a wide range of topics in these hotel blogs. Moreover we are not only focused on text. We also include picture galleries of past events and tourist maps listing attractions using Google Maps.
It is very effective to use a blog as a kind of online concierge or tourist guide for your hotel guests.
As a next step, this content allows the hotel to engage its guests as well other travelers and about what is going on in the destination via Facebook.
By promoting local events in Facebook and participating in discussion on other pages, hoteliers can create more buzz around a brand. And as a result, blog pages get "Likes". Very subtly, hoteliers are growing the sphere of influence of a brand this way.
But blogs can also go beyond social media. SEO (search engine optimization) is a strong potential component of a blog strategy.
Some of the blog articles we created, for example, have raised the hotel position on search engines and gained a primary ranking.
Timing is of the essence here. You have to launch your blog article way ahead of the event to be able to compete. Think at least two or three months.
It is worth reminding the strategy the hotels should avoid being over-commercial - we will never send special offers to our hotel blog subscribers, for example.
However we will promote certain events, and at the bottom or on the side of the blog article we provide a link to a related special offer or to the home page.
This way the content is not viewed as an intrusive interruption but as valuable and useful information on things to do.