How to Create Compelling Content to Drive Bookings

Creating compelling content is an essential part of running a successful business. Great content helps keep customers engaged, increase website traffic, and communicate the value of your services.

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know to produce content that drives bookings. Let’s get started.

1. Understand Your Audience

Before trying to convince your target audience to book with you, know their wants, needs, and pain points. This can help you produce tailored content that resonates with them. 

You can garner these details through research and analysis. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your company’s ideal customer. It gives you a crystal-clear image of who you're trying to reach. With tools like Xtensio and Hubspot’s persona generator, you can create effective buyer personas.

You can also employ tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to conduct online surveys and inquire about your audience's needs and preferences.

Looking for more detailed insights? You have the option of conducting interviews via email, online surveys or video conferencing, which allows for gathering deeper insights.

2. Creating a Content Strategy

A content strategy is your plan that outlines how to create content and distribute it for the best results.

When creating a content strategy to drive bookings, defining your specific objectives is the first step. You might be looking to raise brand recognition of your restaurant, gather more leads for your hospitality business, or cultivate customer loyalty for your spa – whatever it may be, your specific objectives will serve as the foundation for producing and distributing your piece of content.

Make sure your content aligns with what you’re selling as well. So, don’t write a blog post about cooking if you offer spa services. A post on the benefits of a Swedish massage, for instance, is more appropriate.

Check out the content strategy of Intersport, which allows the rental of sports equipment. In their content, they showcase athletes, influencers, and everyday people who have found success in sports and fitness activities.

With these types of content, they aim to gather leads and inspire them to take up an active lifestyle. This can lead to increased rentals of the company’s fitness equipment.

When crafting your content strategy, you also need to consider where you plan to distribute your content. The answer to this question depends on the types of platforms your potential customers frequent. So, to determine whether you’ll be podcasting, doing SaaS email marketing or social media advertising, go back to your buyer persona and your audience research findings. 

Don’t forget to create a content calendar to ensure successful content production and distribution. A calendar can help you organize your topics, formats, channels, dates, and deadlines.

3. Writing Quality and Optimized Copy for Search Engines

You can only encourage people to book with you if your content is high-quality. Would you read a blog post on “How to Make a Delicious Burrito” if it’s riddled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes? Of course not.

So, you need to know how to create content that’s high-quality. For this, there are general tips to follow. Apart from ensuring your content shouldn’t have those basic grammar and spelling mistakes, you should also make sure your body copy is clear and concise. That means doing away with jargon. If you’re a fitness company, don't use highly technical language for muscles or equipment if you're aiming your content at beginners or novices. Tailor the language and terminology you use appropriately for the customer profile you're writing for. 

You can use tools like Hemingway or Grammarly to polish your body copy. Include an enticing and clear call-to-action (CTA).

But writing good content isn’t enough. You must also make the content discoverable.  Make sure your title incorporates your main keyword for SEO optimization. If you need help, you can use a content generator. Ask Writer, for instance, can generate titles optimized for search engines. You just need to insert a prompt:

You should also include relevant keywords in your content body. Just be wary of keyword stuffing - it can hurt your rankings.

4. Incorporating Visuals

If you want to make your content engaging and memorable enough to drive bookings, you should incorporate visuals. Posts with images have 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. Besides, studies have shown that people recall up to 65% of content with visuals.

The screenshot below shows the most frequently used visuals by marketers.

So, use pictures, videos, and animation in your content. Since your goal is for people to book with you, it makes more sense for you to use visuals that specifically showcase your offerings.

For instance, if you’re promoting a restaurant, take a high-quality picture of your new appetizing dish and post it on social channels. Or post pictures of your new dental equipment, if you offer dental services. 

You can also use charts, and graphs to make relevant numerical information easily understandable. If you’re a vegetarian restaurant, you could create an infographic on the nutrients contained in your dishes, for example. Just take into account infographic trends when creating your visual.

Consider utilizing user-generated content (UGC) to showcase social proof and customer satisfaction (more on this later).

Don’t be afraid to get creative and experiment with different types of visuals to see what works best for your audience.

5. Leveraging Social Media

Social networks are a part of everyday life. In fact, the global number of social media users is 4.76 billion.

That means social media is a goldmine for understanding your audience. Just look at the types of comments they make or the things they like. This is information you can use to create content tailored to your audience. Again, when you know how to create content tailored to your audience, you can better persuade potential customers to interact.

You can also use social media to gather content users made about your brand. This is user-generated content. UGC can come in the form of images, videos, or testimonials. It can help you build credibility, loyalty, and word-of-mouth referrals. In fact, according to a survey by Stackla, 79% of consumers say that UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions.

But how can you generate this UGC?
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You can use social media listening tools to see what people are saying about your brand. Just create an alert. Use your brand name as your main keyword.

But don’t just share the UGC you find or post it on your other marketing channels. You need to ask your customer for permission, of course. 

If you want to fast-track UGC creation, you can run contests and giveaways to encourage your customers to make their own content about your brand. For instance, announce a 25% discount on their next meal in your restaurant for anyone who snaps good pictures of themselves dining in your store. 

This type of strategy won’t just help you in the UGC creation process. It can also help you increase sales. After all, people can only use the discount if they eat in your store for the picture-taking in the first place. If they get the discount, they’d also need to buy other dishes as part of their next meal (you’re giving away a 25% discount. The dishes aren’t completely free).

Another option to fast-track the UGC creation process is to simply ask your customers directly to post images and videos of themselves using your products or services. You can say you’ll share their content on your social media and your other marketing channels. For many, that exposure is more than enough incentive to create content.

6. Measuring Success

Your content strategy should also involve content evaluation. You need to see if the content you’re publishing is serving its purpose. This way, you can make adjustments and improve.

Check your key performance indicators (KPIs) and see if you’re happy with them. KPIs are quantifiable measurements. You usually set them before launching a specific campaign, as part of your content strategy.

You can measure different engagement KPIs to gauge whether your content is effective or not. 

When it comes to content performance on social media, keep tabs on KPIs such as likes, shares, and comments. These metrics gauge audience engagement and response to your content. If your content generates many likes, you might want to replicate that content, not just on that social media platform, but on your other marketing platforms. If it doesn’t generate as many likes, then you might need to tweak it.

For blog posts, page views, time on page, and bounce rate are crucial indicators. You can also look at email open rates and click through rates for email marketing campaigns. To track these metrics, you can use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and social media and email analytics tools, among others.

But don’t just look at these engagement KPIs. You also need to see if your content ultimately drives bookings. This is, after all, your main goal. To do that, analyze your sales data. See if there was a boost right at the time you implemented your new content marketing strategy. If there was, then just continue what you’re doing. If there wasn’t any boost, you might have to go back to the drawing board and make adjustments to your content strategy.  

Conclusion

Content marketing is a powerful tool for businesses. If you’re not using it, you’re missing out on the many benefits it offers. To recap, in this article we looked in detail at how to create compelling content that drives bookings by:

• Understanding your audience
• Creating a content strategy
• Incorporating visuals
• Writing quality copy and optimizing for search engines
• Leveraging social media
• Measuring success

With the right strategy in place, you’ll soon see some compelling results.