Based on our experience designing websites for hospitality venues such as The Botanist, The Watershed Hotel and SoCal Sydney, we’ve learned that many hospitality marketing managers want to blog, but don’t see it as time-efficient or cost-effective. That’s why we compiled the Hospitality Marketing Manager’s Guide to Blogging, which outlines a 10-point content strategy showing you how to maintain a profitable, lead-generating blog on your hospitality website, even if you only have about 10 minutes of spare time a week.
Tip #10 – Promote, Promote, Promote!
Without promotion, your hospitality blog won’t generate many enquiries and bookings. It’s the simple truth that the Internet is far too crowded these days for a website’s mere existence to lead to clicks. If you want people to start reading your venue’s blog, you need to pull out your loudspeaker and tell them about it!
One of easiest ways to promote your blog is to connect it to social media. You’ve probably already developed a following on Facebook, Twitter and other channels, but these fans won’t necessarily read your blog in addition to your social media posts. They represent an invaluable audience you can tap into without much effort. Whenever you write a new blog post, just write a blurb about it on social media and include the link and a featured image. The blurb should be as succinct as possible and preferably offer a bit of intrigue, encouraging people to click to find out more.
Regularly posting links to new blog content on social media will not only promote your blog, it will spread the knowledge of your venue to your social media fans and their friends. Facebook, in particular, tells you when a friend “likes” a certain post or page. If you don’t want to manually create a social media post for each blog post, you can always set the blog up to automatically generate social media posts with a specified format.
Also be sure to place social-sharing icons for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn near each blog post on the website. This encourages your visitors to share your content and expands your network in the process, gaining you more subscribers and more social media fans.
Additionally you can highlight your blog in the email newsletter you send out to subscribers. Again, your subscribers aren’t necessarily social media fans and they don’t necessarily read your blog regularly. By including a link and blurb about some of your best posts in the eNewsletter, you can acquire more readers (potential customers). If you’ve written interesting, actionable blogs, this will also enhance the quality of the content in the newsletter and increase readership. The more readers you have, the more possibilities you have of making conversions into customers.
Don’t overlook the value of print material when promoting your blog. As with the email newsletter, mention your blog in any other marketing material you send out in order to keep it in front of your audience. Avoid pressing the issue, but it doesn’t hurt to put links to the blog page on business cards, brochures, menus, flyers and other print items with which existing and potential customers will come into direct contact.
Thank you for reading the tenth and final installment of our series, the Hospitality Marketing Manager’s Guide to Blogging. You can download the full series as a zip file FOR FREE by clicking the link below. The zip file contains the Guide in PDF format for easy reading, as well as a Hospitality Blog Template in both PDF and Word format to help you get started.
Also check out
- Tip #1 – Stay Close to Home
- Tip #2 – Be Consistent
- Tip #3 – Join the Conversation
- Tip #4 – Get Their Attention
- Tip #5 – Focus on the Customer
- Tip #6 – Time Is Money
- Tip #7 – Generate Leads
- Tip #8 – Call Them to Action
- Tip #9 – Think Outside the Box
- Tip #10 Promote, Promote, Promote!
Image © Sunny studio
