Not sure if your hospitality or travel organization should be blogging? Here are five good reasons you should:
1) Better search rankings and free traffic
Most buying decisions today begin with a web search. For this reason, it’s important that your hospitality organization appears highly in search engine results for important phrases. When you’re on top, more people will visit your website…which can lead to more sales.
Search engine marketing professionals only half-jokingly say the acronym BLOG stands for Better Listings On Google.
That’s a little corny, but no one disputes the fact that search engines love fresh content. Sending people to a site that hasn’t been updated for years can make search engines look outdated.
Since blogs are the publishing tools of the web, it’s only natural search engines love ‘em.
2) Blogs build your web presence
Your web presence is how often you show up on the web to people looking for what you offer. It’s based on the philosophy of “distributed engagement”: moving away from a website-centric publishing model, and working toward being seen many places online.
The more times you show up to the people who are interested in buying what you sell, the more likely you are to make a sale.
In the old days, you could get by with just putting up an online version of a paper brochure. Not anymore. Websites with a lot of useful, interesting content are the ones that attract the most attention.
People go online to find things, so the more content you can publish, the better.
3) It can make you a subject authority
People love insider information. When you can provide that you get their attention, and hopefully, their business. After all, the purpose of your website is to provide information that
people cannot find elsewhere.
How does this look practically?
- If you’re promoting a destination, share what’s cool in your region, and when to see it.
- If you’re a restaurant, have the chef talk about special new dishes.
- If you’re a hotel, provide guests with insider guides to your city.
Now more than ever, people want to be educated before making a purchase. Publishing insider information and going behind the scenes can make your guests more likely to buy from you.
4) More influence & reach
Being a subject matter expert has many advantages, online and off. You’ll get people talking about you, you can use that to dominate your online niche.
Blogs are the ideal platform for sharing ideas. Each post you write is automatically saved into a library of knowledge that visitors can browse through and you can re-use in future marketing material.
5) Blogs make a great social media hub
You’ll notice the most powerful hospitality & travel marketing campaigns online today use a mix of social media formats to spread their message.
A blog is an easy way to bring all these types of media together in one place – a central access point where more people can see your content.
Sites such as YouTube and Flickr make it very simple to publish rich media content on your blog. Often, all you have to do is click a button to include it. This makes life a lot easier for you: no technical skills required!
