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The Changing Face of Hospitality Imagery:Customer content & social media

What you’ll get out of this session

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• Why Customer content is important?

• Why you should gather your own & how?

• How you can use this customer content to maximum effect?

Who are Digital Visitor?

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An award-winning social media agency

Some of our clients

Our experience is in delivering technology to enable our clients to capture user generated content & include...

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Importance of Customer content

What is Customer content?

• Reviews & ratings

• Photos

• Videos

• Discussions

• Questions

• Comments & much more...

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Why is Customer content important?

• Photos & video inspire

• Most social channels have migrated towards being more media focussed

• Travel & hospitality industry is experiential – Reviews & ratings are good – photos & videos are better

• Customer content can be about many things that can help you sell your rooms – hotel, facilities, food, location, attractions etc…

• We search for hotels on location (eg. hotels in Barcelona) so gathering customer content organic search traffic

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Benefits of Customer content

Increase browsing time & sales

• Questions & discussions reduce site exits

• Photos & videos browse time up to 100%

• Reviews sales

• Fresh content regularly added on your site search rankings

• You can incentivise and get the content YOU want

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Increase search traffic & reduce marketing costs

• Reduce your marketing costs, use on your website

• Customer content is king for distributing via your social profiles e.g. customer photos on your Facebook & Pinterest channels. Customer videos on your YouTube channels etc…

• Increases organic search traffic to your site – Panda update favoured user generated content & social media

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‘Sandboarding at Erg Chigaga from UK’

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Increase social traffic

• Making it easy for the online visitors & customers to share content will drive more traffic from social media channels

• Your best new customers are friends or family members of happy existing customers

• When adding content, in the last 30 days, just under 60% of users across our network logged in with their social profile

• 41% of these also shared content

How can you capture your own customer content?

Use feeds from these channels:

Visit some of these suppliers for a complete solution:

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How can you ensure success?

• Integrate technology on your site

• Embed branded Pinterest board on your site

• Include YouTube videos

• Integrate 3rd party review widgets

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• Find an all-in-one solution for reviews, photos & videos

• Communicate post visit to capture customer content

• Incentivise for the content you want

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Bluestone national park resort

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• http://www.bluestonewales.com/

• “Upload your favourite memories from your stay at Bluestone including any comments, images, video content and every month we will choose one lucky winner to win a break here at Bluestone!”

• Over 200 reviews

• Many with photos & videos

• 4.8 out of 5

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Customer content in campaigns

Generator Hostels case study

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• 4-week campaign to gather UGC from Generator Hostels social media community, in the form of destination content

• The campaign drove:

1431 entries

709 email opt-ins

2429 new page likes* (from 10,634 to 13,063)

• This content was then used to create travel guides for each of their hostel destinations

“Head to Scheunenviertel in the centre of Berlin, there is lots to see, great shopping & make sure you stop at the Strandbar!”Jennifer (on Berlin)

“You have to check out the Temple Bar area of Dublin. It is full of cafes, bars and galleries and The Irish Film Institute Cinema is a must.”Faye (on Dublin)

Champneys case study

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• Campaign offering spa lovers the chance to win a luxurious pamper break for 2

• Entrants were encouraged to upload a creative picture of themselves in a face mask

• The campaign drove:

3880 email opt-ins

112% increase in new page likes

400% increase in referral traffic from Facebook to Champneys site

• Followed campaign with a Facebook flash sale which generated £21k of revenue in 48 hours

Thank you

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Anthony Rawlins

0117 9055 195

anthony@digitalvisitor.com

www.digitalvisitor.com