Hotels often invest heavily in digital marketing strategies which can include everything from paid search campaigns to influencer collaborations. While these initiatives are vital components of an overall marketing plan, their effectiveness in maximizing Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) can be limited, and sometimes even wasteful, if other elements of your hotel’s digital presence are not optimized.
Consider the travel consumer who sees your metasearch ad or discovers your property in an influencer’s social post. What happens next? For many, the logical next step is a visit to your social media channels and online reviews. Many hotels fall short here. If your social presence and review management strategy are not as polished as your paid marketing efforts, you may be losing potential guests before they ever reach the booking stage—and consequently, losing valuable marketing spend. That’s why a social and review audit—and a clear action plan—should be an essential component of every marketing strategy to maximize ROI.
Audit #1: Consistency in Social and Review Volume
Your audit should start by assessing two key factors:
- Social media activity: Consumers expect an active and consistent brand voice across social platforms. If your most recent post is a stunning summer sunset uploaded two months ago, you may have already lost the interest of potential bookers.
- Review volume and recency: A steady flow of reviews is essential not just for SEO purposes and algorithms, but also for consumer confidence. Studies show travelers read 10–15 reviews before booking, and those under three months old have the most impact.
Audit #2: Quality and Storytelling in Content
Both your social media content and guest reviews serve as powerful marketing tools, reaching tens of thousands of potential guests each month. However, the key lies in content quality and brand alignment.
- Social media: Use high-quality images and engaging storytelling that highlight guest experiences. Avoid low-res photos and excessive promotional graphics.
- Review management responses: Thoughtful, personalized responses should highlight unique selling features and create a compelling picture of your hotel’s guest experience. A well-crafted response doesn’t just acknowledge a review—it influences the next potential guest.
- Review content: Train staff to encourage detailed guest stories in reviews. While incentivizing name mentions isn’t allowed, team members can invite feedback in authentic ways such as online reviews.
Audit #3: Consistency in Tone of Voice
Building and maintaining an on-brand, consistent tone of voice across engagement touchpoints is essential for good brand reputation. Consistency shows that you care about connecting with every one of your guests in an authentic way to drive an outstanding guest experience.
- First, know your audience. Understand their needs, preferences and communication style. Next, build (or engage a third party to build) a brand personality and tone of voice guide for your hotel. Brand personality guides typically outline core traits (friendly and warm, respectful and thorough, clever and direct) to guide your tone across all channels.
- The tone of voice guidelines should stem from your brand personality traits. These guidelines typically include language style (concise, formal, conversational), specific word choices and words to avoid (“coupon,” “hotel chain”) and examples.
- Apply your tone of voice guidelines consistently wherever you are communicating. Indeed, context matters (the type of things you communicate about in response to a comment on Facebook often differ from the kinds of things you would say in an email newsletter), but dependability in your tone of voice – no matter which team or agency partner is doing the writing – will build trust and brand equity.
After you’ve completed these audits, it’s time to put your plan into action – both behind a screen and behind the front desk.
Beyond Marketing: Creating a Culture of Storytelling
Review generation and social content curation extend beyond the marketing team. Every front-line team member plays a role in shaping and amplifying the guest experience.
- Operations & Experience Teams – Chefs, bartenders, and staff can create and photograph share-worthy moments making it easier for guests to capture content organically. With great phone cameras, any team member can capture quality content.
- Front-of-House Staff – Encourage deeper guest conversations beyond “How was your stay?” Train staff to ask strategic questions like, “What amenities are you enjoying most?” This invites storytelling—imagine a guest raving, “Your beds! I finally caught up on sleep and wish I could take the mattress home!” Wouldn’t that type of feedback serve as a great inspiration for a social post or online review?
Proactive Service and Reputation Recovery
Guest conversations do more than generate positive reviews—they help with service recovery. When frontline teams build trust, they can address concerns before they become negative reviews or viral complaints.
Consider the “exception guest” —the one who enjoys their stay but casually mentions, “Everything is great, except… my thermostat isn’t working,” or “I wish I had a better view.” Without proactive engagement, they might never mention it. Resolving issues in real-time improves guest satisfaction and reduces negative feedback.
Even more importantly, these moments of service recovery can become new storytelling opportunities. A guest who experiences exceptional recovery—perhaps a team member who went above and beyond to turn their stay around— may very well share a positive online post.
Using Peer-to-Peer Marketing to Merchandise Your Hotel
With a strong reputation and social media strategy, guest praise becomes a marketing tool. Don’t miss the opportunity to take these positive reviews and merchandise them (in other words, use them to market your hotel) on your owned channels like your website, social media, email and even in sales materials.
For social media, like your hotel’s Instagram, TripAdvisor encourages hotels to take reviews and “build them into custom graphics that incorporate your hotel’s branding.” Take this a step further by including your management’s response to the review, which gives your guests the first peek at the hospitality they can expect when they book with you.
When it comes to your website, displaying positive reviews on your site – as part of a testimonials section, on your hotel details pages, or even on your homepage – can be the difference between a booking and a bounce. With multiple webpages visited throughout the online booking journey, there’s opportunity to draw attention to what makes your hotel unique at relevant steps of the reservation process. Strategically place guest feedback where it matters—meeting planner reviews on the “Events” page, family-friendly reviews on room descriptions, or glowing guest praise on your homepage.
Of course, there are other places to consider peer-to-peer marketing through positive reviews: including one in each of your email campaigns, printing them in sales materials for everything from groups to weddings to meetings, inserting them in your sales team’s email signatures, and even engaging influencers to pull this language into their posts (“I saw all the glowing reviews on TripAdvisor about the hotel’s incredible location, so I knew I had to experience it for myself.”) are all impactful strategies.
When selecting reviews, focus on emotions—relief (your hotel saved the day), joy (a delightful surprise), excitement (breathtaking views), or gratitude (exceptional service). These are very positive feelings that all travelers resonate with and drive bookings.
A marketing strategy that integrates social media, review management, and guest storytelling ensures that the guest journey—from initial interest to post-stay experience—leads to real bookings.
Story contributed by Whitney Reynolds, founder and strategy director at Brian Price, guest engagement training facilitator at The Reputation Lab.
