Digital Marketing
Are You Using Storytelling Effectively Within Your Hotel’s Digital Marketing Activity?
Every great marketer knows the importance of storytelling and it’s an element that’s just as important in the modern marketing mix. It’s not only vital for content marketing but other areas too – the ability to spin a narrative that resonates with your target audience is paramount to selling your hotel’s unique attributes.
But are you using storytelling to its greatest ability within your hotel’s own marketing activity? If you’ve yet to really explore the power of storytelling within your marketing strategy, it could boost your return on revenue.
Why We Tell Stories in Marketing
We all tell, listen, absorb, and connect with stories throughout our day, whether we realise it or not. Your customers and prospects are eagerly waiting for companies to tell stories that appeal to them on a human level. To be successful your marketing capabilities need to go beyond simply selling your hotel rooms. Provoking an emotional response is key to succeeding in today’s crowded hospitality sector and marketing landscape. Digital marketing presents even more opportunities – and challenges – for ambitious hoteliers who want to survive and thrive within the industry. Many customers no longer trust traditional marketing methods, making an unconventional approach all the more appealing.
Using Storytelling for Digital Hotel Marketing
Applying key storytelling techniques to your hotel digital marketing strategy enables a greater level of meaningful engagement with customers, which appears more authentic than alternative techniques.
Customers are now less interested in merely being confronted with the practical elements of your hotel, such as lists of amenities and static pages of information – although this remains important. Instead, they crave opportunities for greater interaction and a sense of the visual, often in the form of large, high-resolution images and compelling narratives. Video content also plays an increasingly large role in digital marketing, offering bitesize videos which suit short attention spans and the modern multi-platform lifestyle.
Combining these different marketing strands helps you to weave a captivating story that will boost outcomes.
Creating Digital Stories
The key factor that leads to digital storytelling being successful is the ability to connect with the audience, helping to forge your brand identity and establish a base of customers. This means targeting key market segments, understanding their needs, and building content that appeals to them is essential to maximise results. This might mean short-form video for your millennial cohort or it might entail designing images to appeal to baby boomers. Whatever your key audience, allow them to guide your hotel digital marketing strategy and the story that you’re telling throughout.
Methods of Digital Storytelling
The influx of different methods at your fingertips makes digital and storytelling a perfect match. You could be posting stories on social media, utilizing a catchy hashtag, or asking your customers to generate content for you as a means of providing social proof. Whatever methods you choose, remember to have a firm goal in mind and measure the activity by an identifiable metric to ensure effectiveness. Through following results you can create even more effective storytelling strategies in future.