VFM Leonardo: How should hotels combine storytelling and visual content marketing?

I am often asked this question by hotel digital marketers: “Do we really need so much visual content to sell hotel rooms?”

I told them:

“It’s not about the content, it’s about the story that these visuals tell about the hotel.”

Simply putting visual content on your website for travelers to browse is not enough to help you differentiate your hotel and attract consumers who are searching for hotel products to book.

These consumers aren’t looking for content per se, but rather for meaningful stories that will allow them to better judge whether your hotel can add a more engaging experience to their trip.

Storytelling is the most engaging and effective form of communication because, as Correy Torrence of iMedia Connection, a community of digital marketing bloggers, says, “A good story makes people prick up their ears.”

Good stories are "rememberable and can be told by others." Storytelling helps hotels establish their value proposition and emphasize the hotel's unique features, which can help travelers focus on more than just commoditized attributes, such as price.

As I shared at a HSMAI seminar in early December, the key to a successful digital marketing strategy is storytelling through visual content.

The digital space is growing at a breakneck pace, and visual content is the catalyst driving its growth. Hotel digital marketers should consider the following:

• Pinterest has over 10 million users and is now the fastest growing social network in history

• Pew Research, a data and analytics organization, points out that 41% of consumers search for photos and videos online and repost them on dedicated sharing platforms

• In the first half of 2012, Facebook users uploaded more than 300 million photos per day

• Flickr stores over 6 billion images

• A rough estimate is that 1/3 of online resources are image content

Visual content must focus on telling a unique story about each hotel, even if their parent company already has its own brand story. To achieve this effectively, hoteliers should consider the following:

• Compelling stories should not be concentrated at the level of the group office, but should be understood, told and experienced at the hotel level.

• Storytelling is not a one-way communication process, but a “many-to-many” process – hotels tell stories to consumers, consumers tell stories to hotels, and consumers tell stories to other consumers. To achieve this process, hotels need to create more stories and enhance the dissemination effect of stories, which includes user-generated content contributed by consumers.

• Hotel marketers will have a significant impact in the market if they have the tools and processes to amplify their story and successfully engage travelers.

With the above in mind, let’s look at how hotels can effectively integrate visual storytelling into their marketing strategies by focusing on the four key points outlined below.

You need to engage with your target audience through unique, direct and interesting approaches and provide visual content on all the devices consumers use. This way, you can communicate your hotel's story to other consumers in the most engaging way.

If you want to successfully tell a story through visual content, you need to focus on four elements:

1. Unique

The stories we tell about hotels are often the same, and there are many reasons for this. The first is that hotels often create content without spending enough time to tell the story.

This results in the hotel's content not looking like their own content, which is neither unique nor inspiring. Secondly, the rich media content that hotels invest in is too standardized and templated.

If hoteliers can think through and develop detailed and clear storylines that break the above conventional patterns, then these stories will be more interesting and they can truly differentiate the hotel.

2. Direct

We recently had Sandy Taylor, Director of Global Sales at Best Western Hotels & Resorts, join us for a webinar where she talked about how business travelers prefer to see photos of the guest rooms over photos of the hotel exterior.

They want to see the rooms, and they are more interested in looking at photos of the room interior. Interestingly, this is also the element that hotels lack the most in visual content, both in terms of static photos and rich media.

In many travel listings, it’s difficult for consumers to see what their room will look like, but this is indeed the information they want to know most.

You should provide consumers with the content they want to see in a direct way, without making them dig for it themselves.

3. Fun

Years ago, consumers would categorize visual content into “professional” and “amateur” categories; now they no longer do that; they now categorize visual content into “interesting” and “not interesting.”

Now, you don’t need the skills of a professional to create interesting content, but I’m not suggesting that you replace all professional content with amateur, interesting content. You should consider leveraging user-generated content to tell your hotel’s story.

If these stories are interesting, consumers will help you tell them to other consumers and increase their spread.

4. Provide visual content on all devices consumers use

The platforms on which consumers interact with a hotel’s visual story are changing, and the number of devices and sites they use is proliferating.

You need to ensure that your visual, engaging story about your hotel is visible across the devices and channels consumers use to research travel products (especially mobile devices), which are more than just a last-minute booking channel.

Summarize

We can see that consumers tend to interact with more visual content through mobile devices, and less through regular web browsers. We (VFM Leonardo) tracked historical visit data of more than 1 million consumers through our own media network and found that:

• Consumers view and share 55% more visual content on smartphones than on regular web browsers, and 50% more on tablets.

• More than 24% of traffic to our media viewing tools comes from mobile devices, with a 50/50 split between smartphones and tablets.

• Smartphones now account for 12% of all visits tracked by our media network and 21% of total media content views, both higher than regular web browsers and tablets.

• 40% of all virtual journey content views across our media network came from mobile channels; and 24% of all virtual journey content visits across our media network came from mobile channels.

• Of all virtual tour content viewed on smartphones, 38% were photos of guest rooms or suites, 13% were photos of hotel lobbies, and 11% were photos of swimming pools.

If you follow the tips above, your hotel will stand out from competitors and be ahead of the curve in terms of updating and curating the latest content as consumers begin to categorize content into “interesting” and “boring” categories.

The way consumers interact with your hotel’s story will continue to evolve, so it’s up to you to understand and meet their needs and engage them through a marketing strategy that’s led by visual content and storytelling.

via: traveldaily