How to increase traffic to your hospitality website and drive footfall

In webinar Marketing masterclass: Creating high-engagement content to increase website traffic, trends and drive footfall Katie Kirwan, head of content and website at Design My Night, takes a closer look at this marketing method and gives valuable pointers for businesses looking to drive traffic to their websites.

From outlining where to start and explaining considerations for the journey, to answering the million-dollar question ‘how do I get my website to the top of Google?’ Kirwan’s tips give hospitality businesses the tools needed to reach their desired audiences and ultimately help bring customers through their doors.

Where you start

For those who haven’t yet started on their content marketing journey or have only just set-off, Kirwan recaps on what businesses need to do to make content marketing work for them.

She suggests doing initial research into your own brand (to see what comes up on Google) and that of your competition and looking at existing data to explore how you can build on the areas that seem to be working.

This, she believes, is a period of experimentation, when you can work out what kind of content will work for you and your brand – whether that may be written blogs or video – and on what kind of platform.

“Try different styles and tone of voice,” she says. “Think unique and beyond what your competitors are doing. That will help you decide where to place that marketing.”

Kirwan advises operators ‘grab a calendar’ and use this to plan content but keep things fairly flexible at this stage. “Make room for future and optimistic ideas you want to tap into,” she adds.

Content and marketing considerations

Once initial research is done and you’re at the planning stage, you should take the following considerations into account:

• Budget – it is important to understand where money works best. Be reserved at the start.
• Content shelf life – when producing content, how long do you expect to utilise it for.
• Input and output – how much time and effort do you put into campaigns? For example, if you’ve got a large team working on a campaign that might only be used for a week, is that the best use of resources?
• Fluid content calendars – when thinking about building a campaign, be comfortable with the fact it will change. Recent lockdowns have meant Design My Night’s content plan has had to change for example.
• Audience changes – your audience will change so be prepared to adapt your content to suit them – a millennial audience might not have same interests three years’ later so content will need to be adapted
• Data – this should be examined to help you make informed content. Look at where traffic is coming from and areas such as how long people stay on a page for. If traffic is not arriving at a certain piece, look at new avenues. Could it be changed? Or will another piece of content be a better traffic driver?
• Imagery – strong imagery is important and original images, so make photography integral to your budget. Creating an artwork guide or brief for images could be a good way to build up a brand and optimise image sizes and name files for better results.

How do you get to the top of Google?

This is the million-dollar question in digital marketing. There are ways to get there, says Kirwan, but it takes a lot of time and effort to achieve it.

Nevertheless, if this is an important area for you, there are a few basic steps that can be taken to help you move forward in your SEO efforts.

Kirwan’s key points are to:

• Treat each page of your website as a ranking opportunity, so choose correct keywords wisely
• Optimise pages with relevant keywords – work out what you are trying to rank for.
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
• Ensure content is relevant to the title and helpful as Google benefits sites that are informative to a user.
• Consider back-linking. Google will merit websites linked from other authority websites. It helps with trust. Some companies put lots of effort into this, others are more organic.

Kirwan’s overarching message in the webinar is to be flexible in content marketing and to not be afraid to trial different approaches. As she states ‘marketing isn’t one size fits all’ so what works for one company might not for another.

However, if you need to focus your efforts on improving your content marketing fast, here are:

Simple hacks to get your website and brand moving:

• Make sure you’ve got a call to action
• Add social media buttons – let people know how to follow you
• About us pages – consider adding these to your site as they are great for brand personality and trust and a good through-route for sales
• Internal linking – make sure if you mention a product you link it, but don’t over-link. Simple but effective is the aim.
• Website navigation – get friends and family to test out your site so users can find what they want and have a good user journey
• FAQ pages – make sure your website is the only place to answer questions as you don’t want people leaving your site to find out key information elsewhere.