5 Design Principles for Creating Visual Content for Hotel Marketing
There is absolutely no denying the power of visual content when it comes to hotel marketing. Visual content is the key to stand out in the sea of choices. I’ve never heard of someone saying: “Saw the most amazing hotel on my way home a few days ago with gorgeous stained hardwood floors in the lobby and decided to stay there for a couple of nights”.
That just doesn’t happen. Hospitality is really not the walk-in impulse purchases kind-of industry. That is why design and visual content are the first impressions you make, let’s see how we can avoid it also becoming the last. Now, we’ve prepared a list of 5 design principles for you to follow with your visual content to successfully market your hotel.
Principle one: leave visuals to professionals
Engaging visual content for your hotel marketing should never become your DIY project. That is just dangerous for any business and especially one where sales depend on the quality visuals and first impressions.
If you are a hotel owner than a professional photographer has been on your premises, as well as a great highly recommended videographer with a team and great lighting, a food stylist and food photographer have also been to your place of business and all of them have produced amazing professional images and videos for you to use on your website, social media, DOOH, etc. The same goes for your digital signage software.
Failure to find a professional DS soft can and will invalidate all of your other efforts. Just for reference: our DS soft partner – Kitcast TV DS soft - is fluent in visual content, they invest heavily in the user experience and design, they spent time and money to test out their templates, offer hundreds of sleek modern fonts and a bazillion of visuals.
Plus, we’ve found a lot of useful marketing advice for hotels on their blog: blog.kitcast.tv. Do you know how many problems we’ve had with them? Zero. And with our previous DS soft we’ve learned to make our own templates in Canva and we were lucky if half of our screens displayed those beautiful Canva-made designs the way they were scheduled. To sum up: leave visuals to professionals.
Principle two: be consistent
If you are dedicated to maximizing the effectiveness of your visual hotel marketing content, you need to make sure that you are consistent with your design and that visual content is recognizable and effortlessly flows across all of your advertising platforms.
Your goal is to make your user feel comfortable with your brand and design consistency achieves just that. It doesn’t really matter where your customer first learns of your hotel, whether it’s a DOOH billboard, your Booking.com account or your site, what matters is that customers will be able to recognize your distinct design the next time, and the time after that.
When you have a consistent design you become familiar and easy to recognize. Ideally, the brand design should mimic human interaction – there’s the first time that you met someone and then you just get to know that person more and more. Inconsistent design is like having amnesia and meeting someone for the first time every single time.
Principle three: authenticity rules
The generic type of hotels have fallen out of favor long ago, guests began to seek authenticity and hotels have undergone amazing transformations. So, if you’ve poured a lot of time and money into creating the kind of authentic guest experience that travelers seek, it goes without saying that all of your visual contents should undergo the same transformation.
You need to make a statement with your visual design, tell a story, be different and show off. Consumers are always more likely to choose services from companies that publish custom content. Originality is perceived by customers as a better quality stamp of approval, thus they are more interested in a company that aims to display excellence in its content. Original photos and videos, authentic design and creative storytelling work, use them.
Principle four: if everything stands out – nothing stands out
Buzzy fussy design in visual content is received just about the same as pillars, gold leaves and huge crystal chandeliers in modern hotels – people hate it with passion. Nowadays, your website design has 10 seconds to convince a passing visitor that your hotel is awesome and you get about up to 8 seconds to grab someone’s attention with your “Come stay with us” visuals on DOOH ads. So, yes, good visual content matters, or rather a clean one.
If a customer encounters a design mush of everything you ever wanted to say and show to them, trust me, they won’t be listening or looking. Keep it simple, use clear calls to action, keep texts to a bare minimum and use professional photos and videos. Today, customers became accustomed to what's quick and easy, overcomplicating anything will end in disaster. The desire for simplicity, convenience, and speed keeps growing and is applicable to absolutely anything. So keep your customers happy and your visual content simple, convenient and easy to understand within seconds.
Principle five: there’s no bad design with UGC
A lot of marketers keep making the same mistake over and over again: they spend a lot of time and money on their visual content design getting it just right and then they decide against publishing imperfect user-generated visual content. Ridiculous. What they should be doing is posting, re-posting, and displaying on the biggest DOOH billboards every imperfect post.
Collect the images and use them across all of your social media networks, your website or banner ads, UGC is the best thing that happened to the hotel industry in a very long while. It is a free advertisement and it is very influential – people trust UGC, it is real thus believable. Now, to sum up: there’s no better designed visual content than the user-generated one, and I have the stats in support of that: people trust USG content 50% more than any other media and 25% of the search result for the top 20 biggest brands on our planet are linked to UGC.