The Beautiful Disaster – The Nature of Content

Online hotel marketing and optimization is a glorious machine, an intricate, multifaceted juggernaut where the latest engine-dominating technology, punk science inspiration, psycho-analytical design flourish, and forward-thinking marketing dollar strategy coalesce to generate maximum performance of the two great benchmarks: traffic and conversion. But this machine, sleek and attractive though it may be, has a screw loose: content, that irrevocably human element, and unless a property (or the hotel internet marketing company the represents that property) can tighten that screw, all it really has on its hands is a well-fueled, well-designed, and genuinely beautiful disaster!

The fact is that search engine optimization and online marketing placement are brilliant at delivering traffic, and indeed without those initial “clicks”, the entire enterprise falls apart. But it is in the hands of content that the all-important task of turning fence-sitting browsers into qualified customers falls. We call this conversion, and no matter how many visitors that primo page rank shuffles onto your site, conversion will not happen without compelling and smartly-written sales content. It’s that important.

So what is great content? Since this is such a debated topic, we should perhaps start with what it most definitely isn’t. For instance, great online content is not a math problem. If as the saying goes SEO is part science and part art, great sales copy is all art, all the time, and in fact it may surprise you to find that the harder you try to “science it up”, the harder you try to formulize it, the less effective it inevitably becomes.

Abandon your preconceived notions of what makes content work, how long you think it should be, how many keywords you should use and what kinds, bullets versus prose, above the “fold” or not and does it really matter, forget all of it for right now and memorize a Zen-simple philosophy: good copy works, bad copy doesn’t.

For example, traditional wisdom and best practices have previously held that content should be as brief as possible, fearing that inundated browsers would scurry away from all that mean, awful text. However, evidence has begun to show that longer, more expressive copy not only appeases those fickle search engine spiders, but, when well-written, it also doesn’t “turn off” a qualified prospect.

In the article, “Tips for Writing Effective Sales Copy” for Search Engine Workshops, Robin Nobles and Stephen Mahaney write:

“Truth-be-known, qualified prospects will read everything as long as it isn't boring. On the other hand, tire kickers (the unqualified prospects) will not read long copy. But, neither will they read short copy.”

With your SEO and paid marketing efforts delivering a surging tide of qualified prospects to your site, the kind of eager, money-in-hand traffic that a top-notch SEO initiative should provide, the content has the freedom to tell the story its own way, and it must express this freedom to succeed in the increasingly-competitive online market. Quality, not word count, art, not science, is at the very heart of this effective sales content philosophy and is the essence of conversion.

The route to great content, then, is clear. Content must be organic. Whereas marketing and SEO are ultimately co-dependent on systems and quantifiable results, content is dependent entirely on the reader. It must feed off the visitors, speak to them, satisfy their needs, and therein lays its isolation from the glorious machine: every single visitor is different. Content maintains a symbiotic relationship with the machine, but it cannot play by its rules, because the second it succumbs to formula, to strict mechanics, the screw drops and everything falls apart.

Indeed, it would seem that “tightening” the screw means being willing to play it loose.