A successful story encourages people to listen to it carefully as well as remember and spread it by retelling the story repeatedly. This is because ‘storytelling’ has been one of the most effective methods of communication throughout history.
Storytelling in the traveling and tourism industry aims to create a “unique value proposition” and draw potential customers’ attention. Many companies rely only on visual elements in marketing and neglect storytelling. However, this does not always guarantee success. This is because potential customers look for meaningful stories that will help them define their traveling experience successfully.
Let’s take a closer look into the subject of visual storytelling, which is the key to a successful digital marketing activity with increased web traffic.
Requirements for successful visual storytelling
The success of digital marketing depends on whether the marketing professional can tell his ‘unique story’ or not. A compelling “visual storytelling” is a method that promises outstanding achievement, particularly for start-up property owners.
‘Stories’ used in visual storytelling are not merely a unilateral communication. This is because the message of visual stories may be delivered from properties to potential customers first, and then from customers to properties and from customers to other potential costumers. In other words, visual storytelling makes it possible to build and develop a story that includes potential guests’ contribution to the visual content. Therefore, online marketing specialists who develop their own stories can have a major impact on their own market, aided in this effort by the tools that ensure successful customer engagement.
How do you integrate visual storytelling into your property’s marketing strategy?
The right infrastructure
The number of sites and devices visited by customers to engage with visual stories is growing rapidly, which makes visual property stories that draw attention and interest even more important. Therefore, you should enable your customers to access your online agency flawlessly through the devices they use during the traveling process. HotelRunner can facilitate your job in this with its features.
Be unique
Visual stories of many properties are similar to one another. There are two reasons for this. The first one is that almost all properties focus solely on putting out content as often as possible, without trying to differentiate the narrative of their visual storytelling. However, this prevents them from coming up with unique or inspiring ideas. The second one is that properties allocate their budget to ‘standard’ communication materials they create by using certain ‘templates’ in conventional media. So, properties should improve customer engagement by standing out with ground-breaking, well-thought and curiosity-arousing visual stories.
Be transparent
Properties that draw attention from a large majority of potential customers publish interior photos of their property. Usually, however, agencies do not cover such content neither in their image galleries nor in conventional media communication. In other words, most of the customers cannot find what they look for among numerous images displayed, while they actually want to learn how the room they will stay at look like. Therefore, we suggest you to be transparent in visual storytelling and show what they look for “as is”.
Be interesting
To customers, what is “interesting” years ago is not interesting today. This is because the criterion for “being interesting” no longer requires professional capability for content generation in most of the cases. Accordingly, you can utilize customer-generated content to create advantage in spreading the visual story of your property to a larger audience. In other words, images from your customers can help you create interesting stories and further develop your own visual story.
Thanks to the visual story making of your customers about your property, you can constantly develop and improve your methods of customer engagement. You will need an experienced and a reliable solution partner, like HotelRunner, not only in this, but also in all other matters related to increasing the sales of your property. Create your free-of-charge account now and start earning immediately.
