All the Hotelier faces the problem of How to increase sales in hotel and how to boost  hotel bookings to make most of the revenue. This post speaks about the different wayst to increase sales for your hotels by making the customer a key person in promoting your hotel.

The smart Customer today inspires, invents and are the perfect story tellers of their experiences. Blogs and Social Media has made it easy for them to share their experiences. Words also add credibility to the Services they just experienced and helping their friends pick the best. They are the users who are generating content for the hotels and Hospitality Industry has a lot to gain over this content.

Since the Hotel visitors are already creating content voluntarily, projecting an exclusive insights & images of the premises through in their own expressions. It becomes an authentic authentic content for the Hotels which is generated for Free! – To Market and to Advertise across their channels.

By utilising UGC, the Hotels make their Visitor, “The king” and add a humanising element to their branding and the source to increase sales for the hotels.

Few ways to increase sales in hotel by using Content that is generated by your visitors

1. Displaying Visual Content, Reviews & Recommendations
2. Including Reviews, Recommendations and Ratings submitted by customers on the website
3. Focussing on Instagram Posts
4. Including UGC on brilliantly designed E-mails
5. Display of rich content on big screens
6. Leveraging User-Generated Content in Print Media

1. Displaying Visual Content, Reviews & Visitor Recommendations on the Hotel Website & Social Media Channels

Sure your Hotel has high quality images taken by professionals! Along with these images, adding images clicked and posted by your Hotel Visitors will add authenticity to the Website and Humanise the entire content. Along with images, Reviews from visitors adds great value for to Hotel’s brand image. These are essential form of UGC that can dramatically increase the quality of search engine traffic.

2. Including Reviews, Recommendations & Ratings submitted by customer on the Hotel’s website

These will inspire potential customers to go ahead and book your Hotel for their next vacation. These Reviews can be posted on Social Media channels to get the recommendations more public attention. Publishing UGC on multiple channels and mediums will get the word out there and gets your brand the “word of mouth” publicity needed!

3. Focussing on Instagram reposts

Focussing on Instagram reposts brings your Hotel brand much closer to your potential Visitor. That’s because Instagram is teeming with beautiful images of your Hotel, all taken by loyal customers! The social proof doesn’t get better than that.
Fact: Ads that include customer reviews have a click through rate four times higher and a cost per acquisition (CPA) 50% lower than other ads, making them cheaper and more effective than standard ads.

4. Including UGC on brilliantly designed E-Mails

From rave reviews to Instagram posts, UGC can help your Hotel stand out and grow, especially when used in emails.
User-generated content in email is a powerful tool and can be leveraged in increasingly creative ways and has the capacity to make the sale when beautifully formatted and designed.

Here are a few tricks for including UGC in e-mailers, to attract your visitors by making the most of your 5 star reviews and the viral instagram posts.

1. Featuring reviews in emails frequently, in an inverse-pyramid layout.
2. Creating Testimonial style emails with Multiple-guest reviews in a modular design.
3. Making a Collage of feedbacks and send out in e-mailer campaigns.
4. Sending top-bookings of the month with tiles: “Best Selling”, “Trending Trending Picks” and “Visitors top Choice”.
5. Including Instagram photos posted by your visitors in an e-mail, speak a thousand words more than any content you can share. The ones that @-tag your Hotel name and use a brand hashtag, or tag the location are popular sources of user-generated content in email.

5. Display of rich-content on big screens:

Imagine a wide screen where all the user generated reviews, tags, hashtags, mentions, tweets, photos and all that positive vibes & words of your brand are displayed?
Welcome to the concept of Social Wall. It is the wall of fame for all your Hotel visitors and guests to get their content displayed.
With word of mouth and social recommendations being shared all around the social web today, it can be very powerful to leverage all that content into a social hub. Using it correctly can lead to strong marketing and engagement opportunities. A Social Wall is a simple way to put all the user-generated content in the limelight is to set up a social media wall.

You can add all kinds of sources, from Facebook pages and events to specific social media profiles, as well as hashtags from Twitter, Instagram, etc. to be displayed on the social wall.

Social walls are becoming the strongest form of genuine advertising, so look into your social wall today and help your hotel check-in to social, so your guests can check-out your content.

6. Leveraging User Generated Content in Print Media:

Whether you use UGC in ads or repost customer content (check-ins, tagged content, reviews etc) on your Hotel’s social media accounts, it’s an effective way to drive traffic to conversion.
Adding UGC in Paid media and Print media not only builds the trust element, but also differentiates your Hotel branding from the competition. Through adding Customer voices & opinions to the marketing collaterals like brochures and brand materials, advertising on outdoor media like Hoardings and billboards etc., Hotels welcome their visitors to be in the spotlight, sharing a strong bond with their visitor base. Such actions inspire brand value and increasing the scope for conversions.

Facts about generating content to increase sales in the hotel

1. A study conducted states that 97 percent of millennials post on social media while traveling (Forbes)
2. 57 percent of Millennials have made travel plans based on an image or video (News Creed) they saw a friend post on social media
3. On average, 32% of visitors to e-commerce sites read customer reviews or look at customer photos before making a purchase. Nearly 90% of people said they click a photo to upload on social media when they visit a Restaurant, Hotel or Resort.

Results are achieved only through effective trials.

Some of the best ways to increase sales in a hotel are to know about what is User Generated Content and use it by experimenting, thinking out of the box and getting creative.