Hospitality has come a long way, with the travel and tourism industry generating around USD 5.81 trillion. The onset of the pandemic brought about quite a few colossal changes in their functionality and engagement, both in good and bad ways.
In the last few years, hotel distribution has seen quite a few shifts, including the sudden increase in distribution channels, increased usage of metasearch sites, shift of focus on reducing distribution costs, the introduction of blockchain technology, and so on.
However, most hotels are still having trouble keeping up with these adjustments to the system’s overall allocation. Most of these issues stem from hotels not understanding the essence of content in all this.
Wait, what? Where does content fit into all this? And even if it does, content hasn’t done any good for me in the past. How is that going to change?
You might be giving content much less credit than it deserves.
Content is the crux of your overall hotel marketing strategy, and content is the primary driving force behind engagement and traffic generation. The further article breaks down the impact of content on the distribution mechanism and the upcoming changes you should be prepared for.
If you wish to know more, read on!
What are the challenges faced in managing and distributing content?
Hoteliers increasingly recognize the significance of modernizing their technological stack and online channels, with overall internet revenue for hotels having increased by 135%. However, the biggest challenge when it comes to managing and distributing content for a hotelier is realizing the importance of content in the first place. Hoteliers need to understand that content is much more dynamic than it seems.
Read Why You Should Care About Hotel Content Management & Distribution
Hence, making a case for content takes the top spot regarding challenges hoteliers face in their marketing and distribution strategy. As a result, another challenge with this one is convincing the owners to invest more in content.
Utilizing the channels hoteliers use is one of the best ways to mitigate this problem. By providing both static and dynamic content scores, these channels can encourage hotels to prioritize content creation.
This gives the hoteliers something to react to, and channels can use this data to understand how hotels perceive content. The ultimate objective is to convince them that content is essential to your entire revenue and is far more real-time and dynamic for the client.
Additionally, hoteliers also need feedback about their content from these intermediaries. A push to help boost their overall content score would automatically translate into higher engagement and sales. You will be astonished at the impact that even a 10% increase in content may have.
To understand this, let’s consider an example. Travelport, a well-known GDS, recently conducted a content survey among its demand partners. The survey’s findings were clear, and content ranked first among the factors that aid the partners in raising their conversion ratios.
As a result, the popular GDS then created a content ‘dress code’, which essentially gives partners a set of attributes or descriptive content that are deemed more valuable for their content marketing strategy and help in conversions.
To keep them informed about the performance of their content, they also implemented static and dynamic scorecards that are updated monthly. The partners were able to significantly increase their content scores and traffic generation through constant communication.
While we are on the subject, here are some other issues faced by hoteliers when it comes to managing and distributing content across various channels:
- Hotels don’t have a uniform platform to optimize and monitor content distribution
- Hotels have to keep up with the ever-growing market of booking channels
- Traditional marketing strategies have been outdated for quite some time now
- Keeping up with the technology growth being “on the fritz”
What are the optimum channels for updating content?
In an ideal world, hoteliers would typically survey and evaluate their conversion rates across various channels and OTAs. After a thorough examination and understanding of the type of content that impacts conversions, they will pay attention to the respective channels accordingly.
However, in the practical world, they operate differently. RateGain recently conducted user interviews on this topic and found that most of their demand partners ask themselves one question: “Which externet is the most user-friendly?”
Which OTA or channel allows them to log in efficiently and quickly update the content that they want to? Sorry to break it to you, but neither of these approaches will enable you to achieve the desired conversion rates.
The key to successful content marketing is a uniform distribution across all channels. But how is that going to help? Well, to represent your brand consistently across all platforms, you must have consistent content.
Naturally, as a hotelier, you will explore a variety of channels to decide conversion rates. Since there isn’t uniformity across all channels, this will lead to a disparity of content across them. There is a chance you might miss out on updating certain channels since they aren’t rated very highly. Hence, what you need is a platform that collates all the content, scores it, informs you on improvements, and pushes it uniformly across all platforms.
To address this, RateGain recently developed an AI-powered content recommendation system. The platform offers a scoring engine that not only provides you with your content score but also teaches you how to raise it, allowing you to update all of your content parameters on a single screen.
The article has been written based on the insights gathered from industry leaders.
Watch the Complete Video on Content Management for Hotel Distribution
Meet the Speakers
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
