Lloyd Hughes, brand director, Pic PR, discusses how to achieve the best results for your hotel through PR, in the latest HOSPA webinar.
Hughes began the webinar by discussing the difference between marketing, where companies have some form of control and earned PR, which has a higher value because it has proven its worth to journalists, acting as gatekeepers for their readers. For Pic PR, he said, “our ethos has always been earned first”.
He said: “They need a reason to write about you. You've got to give something to benefit their readership. We always need to put ourselves in the journalist’s shoes and, with news, the clue is in the name: it needs to be new.
“If you're a hotel, you will have natural news happening, whether it's refurbishments, appointments, it could be a new GM. With events, you need to be a bit more creative, there can be areas of interest for the press around major events and awareness days. So, for example, if you're doing something around Valentine's Day that can be of interest because journalists are actively looking for stories relating to Valentine’s Day.
“The last route is using creative tactics, where you're effectively fashioning the news hook, where you're producing it yourself. You're thinking of something different to help you stand out and for that we’ve got different strokes for different folks. You need to mix up your news hook depending on the media and the audience you're targeting. If you're going after national press, your news hook needs to be a lot stronger than it would be for regional, local and trade.
“How do you come up with ideas? So the top one there is reactive: checking the news every day to see if there's something you can spin or hook off. Another is trends, something that’s regularly occurring in the news and across social media, you can jump on those.
“Something we’re very big on is brainstorming. We're lucky to have a team of 30, so we can call on lots of backgrounds, whether it's different genders, different ages or different ethnicities, we can just bounce ideas off each other and find what I like to call ‘nuggets of inspiration’.
“Then the final one is AI, which has become a great tool to help you flesh out some ideas. Maybe you might ask it for 10, and seven or eight will be useless, but there could be two that are worth exploring.”
And how does this all drive bookings? Hughes said: “First and foremost is brand awareness, so people will know about you and you'll get your name out there. The OTAs heavily dominate search results, and it's quite hard to stand out, so by doing this, you are putting yourself in front of a broader, bigger audience.
“It does drive traffic as well. If you are featured in the news and if they're linking back to your website, you will see a direct uptick on the day that it's published. Last year there was a helpful content update from Google, where revealed what it was looking for as part of its algorithms.
“Previously, links were seen as the Holy Grail. If you had a link to the website that played a real big factor in where you appear in the search results, that is still the case, but within that, there are more signals at play. Just getting mentioned in reputable publications - they will take in the fact that your brand is mentioned within that and take that into account. It will also take into account what you are doing on your social channels, that takes all plays a big part in how you appear and rank.”
So start plotting how to make your content stand out and, to watch the full webinar, click here.
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