How to Measure Your Hotel’s Content Marketing ROI - And Why You Should

With every business move, you should be able to calculate your return on investment (ROI). This allows you to analyze its success, as well as how worthwhile your past techniques wound up being. Today, we want to talk about a specific kind of ROI that pertains highly to the hospitality industry: content marketing ROI.

If you’re a hotelier, you’ve likely noticed firsthand how important content has become to hospitality marketing. Instagrammers highlight their favorite places to stay in sponsored posts. Magazines write columns about luxurious getaways. Even hotels are producing their own articles, ads, blogs, and other kinds of content to attract attention online.

You can’t just produce content without measuring its success - that’s a recipe for wasted funds and ineffective marketing campaigns.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to learn to measure your hotel’s content marketing ROI so you can adapt to create the most effective marketing campaigns possible.

Here’s how you can do just that.

Understanding Content Marketing ROI  

First things first: let’s dive a little deeper into what content marketing ROI is and how it specifically applies to the hospitality industry and your hotel.

It’s very challenging to determine what the best content marketing strategy is if you haven’t measured the success of your campaigns.

How can you compare success and growth without calculating the positive results of different ads and pieces of content?

That’s where content marketing ROI comes into play. The more you can understand how effective different content marketing strategies are, the better your hotel can become about spending money on marketing and attracting new customers.

Unfortunately, many hospitality workers fail to see the value in strategically planning out content and evaluating the success of different campaigns. This leads to wasted time and ineffective marketing efforts that detract from the overall success of your hotel.

Hotel content marketing shouldn’t just be a side gig - it should be a major, well-planned aspect of your marketing campaigns and measurements.

The General Formula for Measuring Content Marketing ROI  

You’re probably thinking, “That’s all well and good, but how exactly do you calculate ROI for a hotel’s marketing campaign?”

Fortunately, there’s a general formula you can apply to most campaigns.

Image Source: OptinMonster

For example, let’s say you put $2,000 into a content marketing effort. Then, at the end of the campaign, you realized you’d made about $6,000 in bookings that directly resulted from the content. You’d take your return, $6,000, subtract the $2,000 investment, then divide that number by your investment.

Multiply the whole thing by 100 and voila, you’ve got a content marketing ROI of 200 percent.

Why Hoteliers and Hospitality Experts Need to Measure Content ROI  

Having said how important content marketing ROI is, we’ll admit something: it’s not as easy to calculate as you’d hope. Most marketers struggle to come up with a percentage that they deem totally accurate and useful.

Image Source: Marketing Insider Group

The difficulty of calculating ROI stems from the many confounding variables that exist in content marketing campaigns. It can be challenging, if not impossible, to determine exactly how much of your website traffic, high hotel sales, or overall revenue stems directly from a content marketing campaign.

Nevertheless, content marketing ROI is still extremely important to calculate – or at the very least, get a good estimation. Without any method of tracking content success, you might as well be throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks as you spend thousands of dollars on content creation and distribution.

Your content marketing ROI calculations will directly impact how your hotel plans, creates and shares content. Even if the number isn’t 100 percent accurate down to the penny, it’s still vital to your marketing strategies.

Metrics to Consider When Measuring Content Marketing Campaign Success  

We already admitted that calculating content marketing ROI is difficult. That’s why we’re going to map out exactly what metrics you need to take into account to get the most comprehensive picture of the content strategy’s success. All of these elements contribute to the return on your investment.

How Many Leads Have You Generated? 

Gaining leads, or people who may eventually become customers and have shown interest in the hotel, is one of the top goals of any content strategy. The more people you have interested in your hospitality business, the more successful your content marketing was.

How do you track leads? We suggest using a tool like Drip, MailChimp, or HubSpot Marketing.

How Many Sales Have You Made? 

Obviously, the number of sales you make can be a huge indicator as to how successful your content marketing campaign has been. However, marketers should remember that not ALL performance indicators are online. You also need to consider offline sales.

Use a tool like Monday or Freshsales to track both online and offline sales so you can accurately compare it to your marketing spend.

What Does Your Website Traffic Look Like?

Not all success comes from a direct lead or sale. Measuring website traffic can be a great way to see how many people are aware of your hotel due to new content.

Unfortunately, monitoring website traffic can be difficult, due to confounding variables like backlinking and spam bots. How can you tell what traffic is really generated by your content and what is random or fake?

The best way to measure website traffic is to qualify it. Determine how you can begin using keywords and monitoring user intent to garner true traffic through your content. You need to know that it’s really your content that’s drawing people in.

Are People Engaging with Your Hotel on Social Media?

In today’s world, roughly 30 percent of online travel planners look at social media for hotel-related content. That’s a huge chunk of your potential audience that’s looking at Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and other apps for their travel inspiration.

Although social media engagement with consumers might not translate directly into sales, social engagement is certainly something to consider when evaluating the success of a campaign’s performance. The more engagement your social media content is receiving, the more successful it is in making an impression on potential customers.

Are You Experiencing SEO Success?

SEO is incredibly important to pay attention to if you really want to know how successful your marketing strategy is in boosting online awareness and conversions.

There are many tools and tricks for measuring SEO success and how well your content has been performing. Some of the most tried-and-true ways to determine if your SEO is doing well include:

• Looking at your Google Analytics to see if people are bouncing away quickly or staying on your website – this tells you how well you are bringing people to your website with content AND holding their interest.
• Checking your number of backlinks with Neil Patel’s Backlink checker. This tells you how many people are linking to your content and improving your site’s reputation.
• Understanding which search keywords your content is ranking for with Google Search Console – and getting clicks!
• Seeing how well your website ranks compared to those of your competitors with LXR Marketplace.

How Many People Are Opting Into Emails?

A key goal in content marketing is getting people to provide their contact information – or lead generation.

Is your content marketing campaign doing a good job of getting people to sign up for your email lists or newsletters? If so, are they clicking on things in the emails and actually reading the content?

When you release a piece of content with the goal of gaining signups, you need to determine two things:

1. How many email signups this piece of content gathered.
2. How many of the signups resulted in sales.

For the email itself, apps like ContactMonkey’s Email tracking tool allows you to send and track emails while also monitoring opt-in rates, your best performing subject lines, and other types of valuable information.

What Is the Online Sentiment About Your Hotel?

Monitoring your online reputation as a hotel is essential to managing the public’s perception of the company. Through carefully crafted content, you can address complaints, provide solutions to common problems, and improve the general opinion of your hotel.

To keep track of where your hotel’s reputation could use a little polishing, pay attention to mentions on social media, blogs, forums, and other places online. The more aware you are of people’s thoughts about the hotel, the more you can work to improve upon your reputation.

Tools like Brandwatch and Brand24 are great for this!

In Conclusion

As a hotelier, if you want to use the best, most cost-effective content marketing strategies, calculating the ROI of your current campaigns is non-negotiable. It’s impossible to determine just how worthwhile a campaign is if you don’t know how many leads it has generated, where traffic is coming from, and how much people are engaging with the content.

Learn to calculate your content strategy’s success today so you can implement better strategies tomorrow. Trust us - you’ll thank yourself for providing numbers for campaign measurement in the future.

Would you like to learn how you can help convert content to cash for your hotel? Check out our blog, ReveNews to learn more about content marketing strategies >>>