Launching a blog is a standard part of hotel marketing. All well designed hotel websites will have a blog area. In addition to providing SEO benefits, the content that fills your blog can be a useful source of information for your social media channels and guest relations. However, many blogs only offer a series of repetitive articles, formatted in the same way. Over time, thisyou’re your blog becomes stale and isn’t used to its full potential.

Switching up content formats will keep your blog interesting, can help you accrue links for SEO purposes, increase engagement and play a part in achieving your revPar goals.

Try these five content formats to breathe new life into your content marketing strategy.

A solid content marketing strategy calls for creativity. Visual content is known to be incredibly effective with research showing blogs with images get 94% more views than those without. With so many useful tools on the market, it is easy to create professional infographics for your hotel to convey important information, entertain and inform your audience. For hospitality blogs in particular, your infographic should be interesting and relevant – you could create an infographic guide to the local area, your resort history, what to pack for a weekend break – the possibilities are endless. If you don’t want to engage a graphic designer, Canva.com is an easy graphic design tool with a host of free resources including layouts, images and fonts. Canva helpfully allows you to choose the size appropriate to the platform you are aiming for and has a range of social media / online templates to choose from to help you create supporting materials to promote your infographic design.

Studies show that 43% of consumers want to see more video content. 51.9% of marketers consider video to be the most effective type of content for ROI so it makes sense to incorporate video into your content marketing strategy. video is a compelling piece of content perfect for topics such as room tours, resort showcases and FAQs. You can use a video to create a mini guide to your local area or create a series based on recommended excursions.

It is always important to refrain from the constant hard sell. A well-structured hospitality blog is not afraid of sharing news, even if that mentions competitors. National and international industry news is a great basis for an interesting blog post. You can mention good news stories, share what went wrong posts or update your audience on regulation changes.

The ubiquitous how to guide still has a place in any modern content marketing strategy. Within a hospitality blog, you could comment on how to choose the best hotel for your budget, or how to travel safely alone at night in a larger city. The choice is yours, but readers like to be educated. Make sure you have a punchy title, be sure to add images and credit any sources you use. Setting yourself up as an industry expert is another great way to generate a following.

A podcast is an excellent way to break up the visual content and is useful for those on the move. In a podcast, you can repurpose older content to be more story-based and breathe life into it with an engaging voice.

Be sure to add an RSS feed and enable social media sharing on your blog so that your audience can act as your promotional team to help amplify the reach of your expanded hotel blog.