How to Do a Social Media and Content Audit For Your Hotel
Thanks to the IRS, the word “audit” can sound a bit intimidating. 😬 Truth be told, auditing your own content is not nearly as scary or difficult as it sounds.
It’s also an important exercise for marketers. That’s because any solid hotel marketing plan is built around understanding your audience. When you perform a content audit, you’re not only looking at posts and pages— you’re reviewing trends in engagement, demographics, and performance.
Analyzing these trends helps you understand what your customers respond to and how to reach them more effectively.
Your content audit helps you gather key metrics about your audience. Once you have this information, you can make changes, re-align your goals, and adjust your hotel marketing strategy accordingly.
So, how do you do a content audit for your hotel? What tools do you need and what metrics should you look for? Let’s dive in!
What goes into a social media and content audit?
The point of doing a content audit is to determine what marketing materials you already have, what’s worked for you in the past/what hasn’t, and what gaps exist that you ought to fill.
Remember: “content” is a broad term, so a content audit covers quite a few different things.
Content includes social media posts (images, video, captions), informational landing pages, blogs, an e-brochure or presentation, marketing videos… I could go on!
Now more than ever, your overall business strategy is likely in flux. Doing a content audit is a good way to identify strengths — as well as opportunities.
Do you have everything you need to make a measurable impact?
Are you speaking to the right audience?
It’s up to you to determine which metrics are most important to your hotel, but your content audit will most likely end up including the following key components:
Your media library (taking stock of the images and video you have available)
Social media profiles (your handle/URL)
Page analytics (referral traffic, etc.)
Engagement metrics (likes, shares, etc.)
Audience demographics
I’ll explain each of these when we walk through the steps required to do a content audit for your hotel. First, let’s talk about where exactly to find this information.
Google Analytics
One of the most important things you need on your hotel website is built-in analytics.
Most hotels choose to implement Google Analytics because it’s free, simple to set up, and pretty straightforward to use — but really, you can use any website analytics tool for your content audit.
Google Analytics gathers a vast amount of data which can shed light on customer behavior.
GA tracks so many useful things, including visits, page views, time spent on your site, different sources of website traffic, and much more.
Hotels can also set up custom “conversions” and measure direct bookings, as well as different types of leads (submitting an RFP or subscribing to your hotel email newsletter, for example).
Facebook Business Manager
Facebook and Instagram are two of the most important social media platforms for hotels.
When creating a Facebook Page or Instagram business account, you’ll gain access to a range of insights that are not available on personal accounts.
Some of this data includes demographic information, engagement, and — if you have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website — you can connect the dots between social media interaction and actual conversions.
Even if you’re not running Facebook ads right now, make sure the Facebook Pixel is installed on your hotel website.
It’s a simple line of copy-and-paste code that gives you incredibly useful data about your customers.
Social Media Scheduling Tool
Not every hotel needs or wants to use a social media scheduling tool.
(Psst… Read this post for my recommendations: The Best Scheduling Tools For Hotel Social Media Management.)
If you’re managing a lot of social accounts — either multiple hotels or a hotel with many F&B outlets — using a tool like Sprout Social or Buffer can definitely make everything easier for you.
Scheduling tools like these also come equipped with powerful analytics. They can pull data from multiple platforms that aren’t necessarily synced up, bringing information from Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram all into one simple dashboard.
Honestly? It’s nice to have all your social media platforms and different analytics together in one place — otherwise, you’ll have to bounce around between each platform to find all the info you need for your content audit.
By the way, my Hotel Social Media Masterclass includes lessons on content planning, scheduling, measurement, and much more. Find enrollment details here or get a feel for what’s in store with my FREE class on writing captions for social media below!
How to complete a hotel content audit, step-by-step
Now that you have a better idea of what needs to be included — and where to find it — let’s review the actual process of auditing your content.
1. Take inventory of your media library
Many of the large hotel chains I’ve worked with use Leonardo to store and share their media libraries.
For most independent hotels, your “media library” is probably a folder on your desktop somewhere containing all of your many photos, videos, and graphics.
Hopefully it’s somewhat organized… but let’s be real, it probably isn’t. 😅 If your images aren’t labeled and organized into many neat little folders, don’t sweat it. It’s 2020, after all, so give yourself a break.
An organized media library is certainly helpful, but it’s not the end-all. Just see what you can find — and while you’re looking, at least try to get it all moved into one central place. For sanity’s sake!
(Even better: Use a cloud-based tool like Dropbox or Google Drive to organize your media library. This makes it much easier to access remotely and collaborate with other hotel colleagues on collecting content.)
The point of this step is to identify any gaps in your existing media.
Consider your main business segments — ahem, these are your hotel content pillars — and look for a varied mix of brand-appropriate, high-quality images and video. Make note of any segment(s) that may be lacking in media.
2. Gather Your Social Media Profiles
Social media is a key component of any hotel content marketing strategy. Social is an important channel for content distribution, supports your hotel SEO strategy, and helps with brand awareness.
In my humble opinion, the most important social media platforms for hotels are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest — not necessarily in that order, of course.
By all means, if it makes sense for your hotel to use TikTok or WeChat, go for it.
In this step of your content audit, you need to review each of your accounts and look at a few specific things:
Profile — have you filled in all the necessary info, including your address, website, etc.?
Branding — is there consistency in the overall look and feel of your profiles, your username, etc?
Relevance — are you actually using this profile and posting timely content?
If you have trouble evaluating these things, you may need to consult your brand style guide. This is a document that walks you through the visual look and feel, along with the written tone of your hotel brand. (And if you don’t have one, consider creating one!)
3. Evaluate your website content
This step can feel like a bit of a “beast” but again, the purpose here is to identify areas of opportunity.
We’re looking for any missing puzzle pieces in your overall content strategy — and your hotel website has an important role to play in all of it.
I’ve also mentioned this before, in my previous article on hotel marketing during a crisis — so if you’ve already followed the steps there and pulled your page list, congrats! You’re ahead of the game.
As a reminder, the easiest way to review your hotel website content is to start with a list of pages. Here are three different ways to find them:
Get the sitemap — Open a new browser tab and type in http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml or http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml (Bigger hotel websites may have more than one sitemap.)
Use Google Analytics — To see the list, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Run a “site:” search — Open a new browser tab and type “site:yourwebsite.com” into the search bar. Hit Enter, and the search results will display every page on your website.
I prefer the Google Analytics method, personally. If you opt for that, make sure to sort the list of pages by number of visits. This will give you a list of results based on your most important content first.
This step doesn’t actually have to be time-intensive, by the way — if you know what you’re looking for.
Once you have your list, start going over the pages one-by-one and consider the following:
Is this content up-to-date?
Is this content useful and/or necessary?
Does the page have any broken links? Spelling errors?
Is the page currently getting traffic? Why or why not?
Does the page have a clear call-to-action? What is it?
And, perhaps most importantly: Is the page pulling its weight, ie. are users taking the desired action? (Reading more, submitting an RFP, subscribing, checking availability, etc.)
For most hotels, your content strategy is designed to drive traffic back to your website — from social media, search engines, and so on.
Getting people onto your website is one thing. Having a hotel website that engages and converts visitors is another. (If you’re still feeling unsure about this, feel free to get in touch!)
4. Revisit your audience
This step is particularly important in 2020 and 2021, as the travel industry has undeniably changed.
If your hotel once relied on a healthy base of large group bookings, for example, your target audience might look a bit different right now.
Due to international travel restrictions, the same goes for out-of-market hotel guests.
You might not see this shift reflected in your existing social media profiles just yet. The better place to look is your website traffic, and thankfully, Google Analytics can supply demographic and geographic insights.
Social media audience demographics can still tell us a lot. Different people use platforms differently — but if you find that your audience doesn’t look consistent across other platforms, you may want to rethink your approach.
My advice is to consider both sources, but plan your content strategy around who your audience is NOW as opposed to who they were last year.
5. Set your S.M.A.R.T. goals
What do you want to achieve with your hotel content marketing strategy?
How does social media support and drive your overall business objectives?
If you’re not sure how to answer those questions, take a pause on your content audit and revisit your hotel marketing plan before you go any further.
After you’ve identified that big-picture, hotel-wide objective, it’s much easier to get clear on measuring the impact of your content strategy by setting some S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Remember, SMART goals are:
Specific: What exactly do I want to accomplish here?
Measurable: How will I know when I’ve achieved this goal?
Achievable: Do I know how to accomplish this goal or can I learn how?
Realistic: Is this goal really possible, or even worthwhile?
Time-Bound: Can I accomplish this goal within one quarter/one year?
Depending on your goal, you might use different metrics or KPIs to measure success.
Let’s say one of your goals is to “increase brand awareness for the hotel restaurant.” As a marketer, some of the metrics you’d want to keep an eye on include:
Number of social media followers
Post impressions
Post saves or shares
Link clicks (such as your profile link, or the Contact button)
Referral traffic from social media to your brand website
To turn this into a SMART goal, we might say, “increase local market brand awareness for the hotel restaurant in the next 3 months.”
Here’s how we might break this goal down even further using the SMART framework:
Is it specific? Yes, we’re focusing on “brand awareness” but with a specific, local audience.
Is it measurable? Yes, we’ll measure this by looking for a 15% increase in social media followers located within a 10-mile radius.
Is it achievable? Yes, we can target that local audience using locals-only special offers and boosting posts to that target audience using $10 Facebook ad spend per post.
Is it realistic? Yes, research informs us of a demand locally for to-go lunch and dinner options, and we’ve created a product to meet that demand.
Is it time-bound? Yes, due to current travel and dining restrictions, we expect this offer to remain in demand over the next 3-month period.
That’s just an example — and it might feel a bit long-winded — but once you get the hang of setting SMART goals, it’s much easier and quicker to do.
The ability to analyze and act upon data is a critical skill for any hotel marketer to have. Don’t skip this step!
6. Analyze Channel performance
I actually don’t believe analyzing every individual post is a good use of time, so when I say “analyze performance” I really mean overall channel performance.
Now that you’re armed with a few S.M.A.R.T. goals, you’re in a better position to review overall performance.
Think back to the key metrics you identified in step 5.
For most hotels, direct bookings will be one of — if not THE — most important objectives. Facebook “likes” are nice, but actual return on investment comes from social media driving good quality traffic, and eventually, solid leads.
Make sure you have the appropriate tracking pixels in place to link up your efforts across social media with actual bookings and leads on your brand website.
Which marketing channels did the most heavy lifting for you?
Is your hotel blog ranking well for target keywords and driving consistent organic traffic?
Does your audience on Instagram engage with your content or are they mostly bots?
Which social media channel drives the most traffic to your brand website?
If you’re in the process of finalizing next year’s hotel marketing budget, this part of your content audit is incredibly important.
Use this information to allocate resources to your top-performing channel(s), whether that’s budget for more lifestyle photography, an extra team member to help create content, or outsourcing blog writing to a hotel copywriter.
Final Thoughts
Let’s recap those six steps to completing a content and social media audit for your hotel:
Take inventory of your media library
Gather your social media profiles
Evaluate your website content
Revisit your audience
Set your S.M.A.R.T. goals
Analyze channel performance
It's worth taking the time to complete a hotel content audit right now as it will only help you streamline your marketing plan for next year.
It’s an unusual time for the hotel industry, no doubt. The winners will be hoteliers who adapt and innovate to meet the changes in audience demographics, behavior, and business mix.
By the way, my Hotel Social Media Masterclass includes lessons on content planning, scheduling, measurement, and much more. Find enrollment details here or get a feel for what’s in store with my FREE class on writing captions for social media below!