Tip #4 Get Their Attention – Hospitality Marketing Manager’s Guide to Blogging

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 #4 – Get Their Attention

Every blog post title creates another opportunity to boost your website’s ranking on Google, Bing, or other search engines. It’s also critical to attracting actual humans to click on and read your post (and hopefully make a booking or enquiry while they’re there). But coming up with a killer headline can be frustrating, to say the least. Here are some tips on how to craft that perfect title for your hospitality blog post.

1. Meet expectations

Yes, you want to have a catchy title, but beware of turning it into a piece of clickbait that promises the moon but delivers an old rubber boot. The content of the blog post should always fulfil the promise of the title. If you tell readers you’re going to give them something fresh or practical, you’d better make good on that. Otherwise they’ll leave your website with a bad taste in their mouths and assume your venue won’t meet their expectations either. That destroys trust.

2. Be brief

Most titles get cut off at 70 characters in the search results. Since you’re limited in how long a title can be if you want the whole thing visible, you need to be as descriptive and clear as possible. Don’t write a rambling, complicated title that people won’t bother to click on. You’ve got to get people to click-through to your website in order to have the opportunity to convert them into customers.

3. Make it actionable

A blog title should always invite people to take action, whether it’s learning how to do something or finding the answer to a question. Examples are starting a title with “How to…,” “5 Foods…,” “10 Tips…,” or “3 Dishes…,” or framing the title as a question so that people have to click to find out the answer. You can also create a sense of urgency by using the phrases “don’t miss,” “first,” “last,” or “only.”

4. Intrigue them

When trying to think of a blog title, it’s helpful to make a list of 10 or more variations, each using different word order or word choice. Consider multiple ways of saying the same thing and pick one that would make people stop and click due to the uniqueness of the phrase. Good titles often include a quirky or cheeky style, a strange juxtaposition of ideas, or play-on words. This kind of language can be a nice reflection of your venue’s personality as well. Other titles may contain a phrase at the end describing a common objection or addressing people who don’t like the topic.

5. Avoid keyword-stuffing

It’s fine to include a keyword in your blog title, but don’t get carried away here. Remember that the best way you can convert readers into customers is to provide them with good, actionable content. A clunky title full of keywords may give your post a higher search engine ranking, but it won’t encourage people to click. If you need a good keyword, research which search terms are landing people on your website. That way you’ll be sure to get your readers’ attention.

6. Learn from the market

What titles are your competitors using for their blog posts? Do a bit of research to find out what blog titles have earned the most clicks and conversions for other hospitality venues. After making a list of these, think about how you could put your own spin on them to make them work for your venue.

Discovering the best titles will require some experimentation, so don’t worry if you have to go through a few before you hit on a winner. As long as you set the right expectations, keep the title brief, actionable and interesting and include a well-researched keyword, you’ll give every blog post a fighting chance to drive people to your website and convert them into customers.

Thank you for reading the fourth 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 © Dayna More