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nvesting in quality content is a non-negotiable for hotels and resorts looking to connect with potential guests, drive brand awareness, and build trust through authentic storytelling. But once you’ve developed and executed your content strategy — the destination blog posts are published, your social media presence is polished, and your landing pages have been optimized for search engines — what’s next?
For a hotel and resort content strategy to truly succeed, it can’t just look pretty; these pieces of marketing collateral need to translate into bookings and revenue. Here, we’re sharing a guide to tracking “soft” metrics (like engagement and time spent on site) and connecting them to the “hard metrics” that show real ROI (room and event bookings).
What Are Soft and Hard Metrics?
Soft metrics are all about how audiences respond to content, intellectually and emotionally. While harder to measure and connect to revenue than hard metrics, you won’t want to overlook these more qualitative pieces of data. Soft metrics like shares on a recent social media post may not directly relate to your brand’s ROI, but understanding how your audience is engaging with your content can give you heaps of useful information for future social media marketing campaigns. Similarly, knowing a page’s bounce rate will clue you in to whether potential guests are finding what they need on your site. These are all soft metrics that indicate whether your storytelling is resonating with visitors and followers.
Hard marketing metrics, on the other hand, directly tie to conversions: bookings for rooms, special events, or on-site restaurant reservations made via your brand website. These easily measurable data points reflect how well your content’s intangible emotional quality is benefiting your bottom line.
Tools for Tracking Soft Metrics
To ensure your hotel and resort content strategy isn’t overlooking soft metrics, consider using a combination of these tools and platforms:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Tracks time on site (average session duration), pages per session, and bounce rates.
- Instagram Insights: Looks at reach (visibility), engagement (interactions), audience demographics, follower growth, and profile visits.
- LinkedIn Analytics: Captures impressions and click-through rates.
- Hootsuite or Sprout Social: Aggregates data and compares it to industry averages.
- Typeform: Creates quizzes and surveys that can track customer engagement and feedback.
- Brandwatch and other consumer intelligence tools: Collects and analyzes social media metrics to calculate engagement rates.
Bridging Both Types of Marketing Metrics
To determine whether your content marketing is driving revenue and meeting your brand’s goals, you need to connect them with advanced analytics. The key is to identify the soft indicators that are involved in hard conversions and position them for greater impact. Here are some ways to do just that using UTMs, Google Analytics, and other tools.
1. Track the Content Involved in Your Customer Journey
- Determine which content pieces users engaged with before they converted — even if they didn’t click a CTA (call to action) immediately.
- Identify which soft actions, like downloading a vacation itinerary or watching a testimonial video, precede conversions.
- Assign point values to soft interactions with content (think: one point for opening an email, one point for requesting information) to create a lead score, then analyze which score ranges correlate with higher conversion rates.
2. Look for Correlation Between Soft Metrics and Hard Results
- Check whether spikes in website traffic, brand mentions, or other content engagement coincide with increases in bookings.
- Identify which blog posts or other pages on your site have high page views or high time spent on page. Then, determine if those pages are in conversion paths.
- If a hard metric dips, do some digging to figure out whether soft data (such as negative comments on social media or reduced time on key webpages) can help explain the drop.
3. Hone What’s Working — and Let it Shine
- Optimize your site’s high-performing webpages that precede conversions to make them easier for both humans and chatbots to find.
- Surface these pages in emails, on social media, and in your website navigation to encourage visitors to enter the conversion path.
- Strengthen CTAs by using clear, concise, action-oriented language like “Book Now” or “Download Our Vacation Itinerary.”
When measuring the impact of your hotel and resort content strategy, remember that it can take a while for a clear picture to form. Keep tracking and comparing this data regularly, watching for trends and takeaways that emerge over time. (Better yet, partner with a marketing team that has expertise in hospitality marketing, data collection, and content analysis — contact our team today to learn how we can help.)