GLOBAL REPORT—Hotel brand companies are increasingly turning to content marketing to connect with consumers, to build loyalty and, ultimately, to increase business.
For some companies, content marketing is a natural evolution in the use of the Internet as a promotional tool.
“What we’ve said for a long time and what has driven a lot of our digital marketing efforts is that we must meet our customers where they are,” said Elizabeth Pizzinato, senior VP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts. “If the consumer is on Twitter, the brand should be on Twitter; if the consumer is on Instagram, the brand should be on Instagram.”
Pizzinato said Four Seasons expanded that philosophy in developing its content marketing strategies and tactics.
“If you take the notion of meeting your consumers where they already are and go one step further, you can define content marketing as creating compelling and engaging content with the right degree of frequency across all relevant channels to establish a fully realized and differentiated voice for your brand.”
Some marketing executives frame content marketing as a customer engagement tool.
“We have an average 2.1-night length of stay at our hotels, so we must engage with our guests during the other 363 days of the year,” said Kathleen Reidenbach, senior VP of marketing for Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants. “Content marketing allows us to extend that guest experience beyond the on-site visit. That’s the primary focus, but there is a longer tail that happens by building strong relationships, and that shows in our ability to achieve great results at our hotels and restaurants.”
Four Seasons’ Pizzinato said the decline in business for the luxury hotel segment during the recession compelled the brand’s marketing team to redirect its traditional marketing priorities of print advertising first and digital marketing second.
“That moment in time forced us to take a look at how we could best reach this customer who was becoming more fragmented,” she said. “We made a conscious decision by 2009 to devote more of our marketing dollars to digital marketing, and by fault that was content.”
The Four Seasons marketing team created content extensions to its existing online Four Seasons Magazine with several blogs: Taste and Have Family Will Travel. And in 2012, the company relaunched its website to highlight its content marketing output.
While opinions differ on the definition of content marketing, marketing executives agree it’s a strategy to inform and even entertain consumers.
“Content marketing is developing creative that adds value to consumers first, knowing if we do it over and over the right way it will provide value back to us,” said David Beebe, VP of creative and content marketing at Marriott International. “At its highest level, content marketing is storytelling that informs, entertains, solves problems and gives information that adds value.”
Beebe, who joined Marriott last year from Disney-ABC Television Group, oversees the company’s Global Creative and Content Marketing Studio, which generates a range of film, video, digital and online programming that Beebe said falls into two buckets of content: information and entertainment.
“Informative content includes travel tips, destination content—what to do in a city, where to go—and content for Marriott.com, for our Reward members and for our app,” he said.
Entertainment content at Marriott includes both scripted and unscripted video products, some for delivery through the Web and some on cable television. The Navigator Live is a TV series shown on AXS TV that highlights the Renaissance Hotels brand. “Two Bellmen” is a short film produced for the Marriott brand and filmed at the JW Marriott in Los Angeles.
“The story was written from scratch and takes place in and around the hotel, but it’s not about us integrating a hotel into an existing story as you would see a brand doing in a cheesy integration type of way,” Beebe said. “The hotel merely serves as a backdrop, a character in the story that enables the story to take place. You know visually it is at a JW (Marriott) because you will see the logos on uniforms and in some establishing shots. It’s natural and authentic to the story, rather than us trying to insert ourselves into the story.”
Not a hard sell
Pizzinato of Four Season stressed that content marketing plays a different role than does traditional advertising, especially in marketing to affluent travelers. She said these travelers typically do a lot of research before deciding on a leisure destination and a hotel.
“They are very informed consumers, perhaps to a greater degree than other consumers might be, and because they do so much research they often start with ‘Where should I go next? What’s great? What’s off the beaten path?’, and content marketing is a great way to reach them,” Pizzinato said.
Because these consumers don’t absorb content in a linear way, Four Seasons needs to provide content to them in every stage of the customer journey, she said.
“If I search Costa Rica luxury vacations or Costa Rica as a family destination, we want content to surface up about Costa Rica as a great destination for families brought to you by Four Seasons,” she said. “When you’re at the top of that funnel making that considered decision to travel we want you to come across an article in our online magazine about Costa Rica or from a blogger with two kids who went to Costa Rica and had a great time.”
At Kimpton, the marketing team enlists employees to contribute to the brand’s content marketing efforts.
“We don’t have ownership of content marketing sitting with one person or a few individuals; rather, we lean on our employees to help generate relevant content,” Reidenbach said. “Developing content for a hotel in Savannah needs to come from that local team. We also have a network of enthusiasts and champions around the company to help generate content. If we want to share great ideas for appetizers or wine for Super Bowl, we pull that information from our bartenders and sommeliers and our chefs. We just don’t make it up.”
Measuring return on investment
An important question regarding content marketing is how to measure its success and return on investment.
Kimpton marketers monitor consumer engagement on social media to test the efficiency of its content marketing.
“We look at likes and comments, and we test different things to see what types of content receive more likes, comments and other kinds of engagement,” Reidenbach said. “Content that seems to be popular is the kind the aligns with who we are as a brand, especially food, wine and entertaining.”
At Marriott, Beebe employs what he calls the “three Cs” to judge success of the company’s content marketing efforts.
“The first is content, or creating relevant and engaging content that informs and entertains. If we do that over and over the right way, that gets us to the second C, which is community,” he said. “You start to build loyalty and community around your content and scale that up. The third C is commerce, where you can start to monetize that audience. Give people value first through that content and build that community and trust with them. Then we can ask for the sale.”
Beebe said content marketing can be especially effective in attracting millennial customers.
“Millennials know brands need to market and advertise, but if you provide value to them first they don’t mind. They accept it because we didn’t say to them, ‘Look at us, we’re great, stay with us.’ We gave them something they wanted first.”