It is a sad fact of life that the Wi-Fi in hotels is never as good as any of us would like. As more and more travelers bring multiple devices on trips, higher bandwidth is more important than ever before. In fact, multiple surveys from the travel industry show that Wi-Fi is among the top amenities that matter to both businesspeople and leisure travelers. All of which leads to a pretty fundamental question: If Wi-Fi matters so much, why is great hotel Wi-Fi so rare to come by?
The likely answer is that hotels don't want to pay to upgrade their networks since the technology is readily available for implementation. If this is the case, that leaves a great business opportunity wide open—and not surprisingly, there are a lot of companies providing exactly this type of service cost-effectively.
When you do a Google search, however, for anything related to hotel Wi-Fi, one company continually comes to the top of the page—Moonblink. Why is it at the top of the list? The answer comes down to a particularly effective use of content marketing, and a brilliant case study that any small-business owner selling any type of product or service can learn from.
Lessons Learned From Moonblink
1. Show off your expertise. "Does Your Hotel Wi-Fi Suck?" is an infographic produced by Moonblink that shares data about why travelers care about Wi-Fi access, why there are so many problems with it and how to fix it. This last piece turns out to be particularly important, because Moonblink happens to be the company that can fix it. They provide services to help hotels upgrade their wireless connections, and the infographic is part of their smart content marketing effort designed to reach those who are in positions of authority and may be able to hire Moonblink.
2. Answer a common question. The infographic, besides distilling a lot of information down to an easily understandable format, answers common questions revolving around bad Wi-Fi in hotels. One of the most fundamental principles in content marketing is that it works best when you focus on providing utility and answering the questions people are asking. Moonblink does this perfectly.
3. Create multiple destinations. It is valuable to have a single great piece of content, but the more places you can distribute it, the more widely it can reach. Unfortunately, simply creating multiple pages on your own site won't work—because Google treats multiple pages on one site as subdivided sections of the same search result. Instead, you need to distribute widely—something Moonblink does well by putting the infographic on multiple sites.
4. Share a bigger story. On one of the sites hosting the infographic, there are comments allowed via Facebook. One of the things you'll notice immediately is that the first comment in the stream is from the marketing director of Moonblink, offering thanks to those who shared the infographic and inviting anyone to read "the full story" on the Moonblink blog.
5. Use power phrases. In the online marketing world, there are a host of phrases that generate a disproportionate number of search results. "5 Ways To _____" is one such model. Another is the powerful phrase "How To _______" which also happens to be one of the most frequently searched for phrases on YouTube. It may seem gimmicky to title blog posts or pieces of content with these phrases, but the fact is they work and people do tend to click on them. Whether or not the content they find behind them is really substantial is the real challenge you'll need to focus on.
6. Offer a clear path. At the end of the blog post on Moonblink's site, you'll find another question for the reader: "How much Wi-Fi does your hotel really need?" By doing this at the end of the initial article, Moonblink has greatly increased its chances that the prospect will continue reading further and engage even more deeply with the site.
Nobody's Perfect: Bonus Lesson
One thing the company might have done better is to share more details about the person or people behind the content. At several points during the article, it shifts to the first person ("I’m here to convince you that it’ll be the single best investment you ever make for your hotel’s future"), which would be a lot more powerful if you knew who the person was writing the post. Aside from that, the entire effort is one that you can study to learn a lot about how to connect your content marketing efforts to a real question people have, and bring your prospects to your website to learn more about your business through a smart engagement strategy.
Rohit Bhargava is the bestselling author of four marketing books and founder of the Influential Marketing Group. He spends a third of every year navigating hotels and bad Wi-Fi ... and actually does choose (and avoid!) certain hotels based on the quality of their Wi-Fi connections.
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