There is a lot of basic information available out there about developing an Instagram marketing plan to drive visitors to your hotel listings. Although some of this material may be indeed valuable, most of it only goes so far as to cover the fundamentals!
Instagram marketing plans for a hotel should include polished visuals to boost connection and hashtags to improve discoverability – that’s what you most probably already know. It should also include “calls to action” to urge users to click. Each of these aspects should ideally be optimized for distinctiveness.
Good news: that’s exactly what we will discuss IN DETAIL today. Continue reading to learn about the essential aspects of a hotel’s Instagram marketing plan and how you can optimize them to stand out from the crowd!
What are the 6 essential elements of a hotel’s Instagram marketing strategy?
Not everyone is aware of the key components of a great hotel’s Instagram marketing strategy. If you’re just getting started, chances are you don’t know everything, so let me get you up to speed. Below, we’ll discuss six things you can learn from the most successful hotel marketing specialists – the ones who turn their Instagram profiles into a highly profitable social medium!
Master Visuals To Boost Organic Engagement
It’s true that uninspiring shots don’t get clicked. However, since visuals are the first thing potential customers see when they click on your account, they are typically the initial point of contact between you and your target audience.
Do you want to create an excellent first impression as a hotel profile?
Oh, I see you giving the nod! And – what’s even more critical – when you make that first impression, you want it to LAST. In other words, you want clients to recall your listing until they make a purchase decision (in this case, a booking decision).
Why?
Maybe someone seeking a place to stay will most likely look at other listings prior to actually finding yours. This makes it TOO simple for them to forget about your offer by the time they pick the best alternative for their budget and demands, which is why you want to be in the customer’s mind throughout the buyer decision process. You want people to recall “that one outstanding property with the…”
Implementing inspiring, emotion-evoking images increases the likelihood that your target audience will remember your listing beyond the first visit. Believe me – nowadays, it’s a must have.
Optimize Your Instagram BIO for Discoverability
One of the most important aspects of a hotel’s Instagram marketing strategy is optimizing your ‘Gram’s BIO for discoverability. You’re losing a lot of money if your profile doesn’t show in the search results of those who are actively trying to find a nice hotel in your destination.
When users search for anything, Instagram works really similarly to Google in terms of selecting the results to show for that specific search query: It emphasizes what’s new and ranks the results based on relevancy.
Consequently, if your Instagram account and its BIO aren’t optimized to show in search results for those trying to find a hotel in that particular location, let me tell you: you’re losing potential revenue.
There are various factors to consider while optimizing your BIO for Instagram discoverability, but the main ones are:
- Utilizing relevant keywords
- Explaining who is your hotel’s target audience (adults? Families with children because you offer lots of activities for them?)
- Describing your hotel’s biggest advantages
Use the Power of CTAs (Calls to Action)
It’s one thing to create leads and drive engagement via graphics and BIO discoverability optimization, but it’s quite another to convert those leads into ACTUAL bookings.
A call to action often serves as your closing in this situation!
A powerful CTA not only encourages your target audience to act, but it also instructs them on how to act. Which is why, before deciding on the sort of CTA to use, evaluate what you want to accomplish with it.
It may seem evident at this point that “what you’re aiming to do” is to convert leads into paying clients. But, hey, business requirements change, and you may find yourself needing to increase page traffic or promote engagement (to name just two examples) so that your listing appears higher in search results.
Can you reach a bigger audience with hashtags? Of course, that’s what they’re for. I believe IQ Hashtags is a good place for the initial step. It allows you to search for related hashtag keywords and discover the most effective and trending ones for your niche.
Best practices?
Don’t use the same set of hashtags every time you post (instead, research new trending ones every time you can), and track their performance (you can also do it with the tool mentioned above, at least that’s the way I like to do it), to discover which ones are most beneficial for your profile.
Keep an Eye on Your Profile’s Insights to Track the Growth
How can you tell whether your hotel’s Instagram account is growing how you’d love it to?
Tracking the performance and ROI of all your marketing operations is one of the less glamorous – but most vital – aspects of growing your Instagram presence. Sadly, Instagram itself (and its native insights) does not effectively measure all the data you should track. So, how do you keep track of your growth and watch it in time?
Two irreplaceable tools to help you with it are Google Analytics and IQ Hashtags.
1. Google Analytics will help you track the ROI of your Instagram marketing. How do you track traffic and click-through rates?
Yup, one method is to use Google’s URL Builder to create a unique link (UTM), similar to this one:
displaypurposes.com/?utmsource=instagram&utm medium=social&utm campaign=profile
That’s not very appealing, I know. However, you can conceal this by using customized link shorteners in the URL of your Instagram bio.
2. IQ Hashtags will help you track your profile’s growth in time – so you can spot all the tendencies in your growth patterns (you will be surprised how valuable they can be).
Analyze your audience
Perfecting your hotel content strategy to ensure it achieves your dream objectives is no simple task – I won’t lie to you. As you already know, you need excellent copy skills, engaging captions, clever use of hashtags researched with the right tool, and beautiful content that is truly valuable to your community (and your target audience).
With so many different boxes to tick, it’s a good thing to understand your followers and the community you’re growing as a whole.
IQ Hashtags analytics shows you how your followers are responding to your content, which content turned out to be highly performing. Put simply: it will tell you what’s working, and what’s not. Use this data to optimize your future Instagram content and get better results.
Protip: Start your free IQ Hashtags trial (if you don’t already have an account), and start using its Followers Activity to track when your followers are online – it will give you the MOST VALUABLE insights about when you should post fresh content. You will analyze what day of the week gives you the highest exposure and what part of the day is the most beneficial for you – turn this knowledge into your superpower!
The Final Thought
Integrating those six parts of a hotel marketing plan listed above is an excellent place to start. Almost everyone in your competition is growing and reaching higher too! You must distinguish yourself by maximizing your visuals, hashtags, and calls to action. Targeted hashtags, good CTAs, and intriguing BIO – that’s your homework for today.
P.S. Do you market your hotel on Instagram? Don’t hesitate to show us your results!
