How much does new content increase sales?
This Behind the Scenes hotel photography story appeared originally on my old website in 2017. I updated it and decided to re-post it on my new website. Although the pandemic has made travel very difficult right now, we will be able to travel again soon. Now is a great time to edit existing marketing material and photograph new images for post-pandemic travel.
Good images are necessary in order to be commercially successful. All advertisers, clients, and photographers firmly believe that. But how much do they sell? What is an image worth? That’s exactly where the guesswork often starts, and the opinions differ.
For most of my interior design and architectural photography jobs I take A LOT of pictures, do my post-production magic, and then deliver the images. End of show. Maybe my client gives me some “oohs”, “aahs”, and “great job” but that’s very often as much feedback as I get.
For the past couple of years I have been working on a hotel photography project with the Malecon House Boutique Hotel on Vieques, a small island off the Puerto Rican coast, in the Caribbean, on a complete re-branding project. It included new corporate design, website audit, new website, new mission, new social media outreach, new templates for collateral material, new hotel photography, and for all of that we needed A LOT of photographs. It ended up to be around 60 images to tell the story for publicity and advertising of the hotel and another 250 for social media purposes.
The hotel had been in the market for over 6 years and had changed ownership. The new management had a clear vision of where they wanted to go, and we went to work.
As photographer, I usually do not get much insight into the direct effect images can have, but when I also get to work on the marketing, like in this project, I need to have access to detailed information to see what is working, and what is not.
Below is a before and after screenshot of the hotel website. From and old fashioned confusing design to a new fresh flat design that uses negative space, puts emphasis on images, and is designed with mobile users in mind.
Organic Search increased over the first two months after launch of the new website by 180% and social media clicks increased by 250% compared to previous year.
It is hard to say which role the images alone play compared to updated SEO and more efficient coding. But when I looked at the results on 3rd party platforms, where ONLY the images could be changed, like Expedia and TripAdvisor, I got a pretty good idea of the effect the images had.
The new images of the boutique hotel Malecón House were uploaded to TripAdvisor at the end of November. The views grew in December and January by over 50%. It is quite a substantial increase for an already established hotel. But does this increase in views translate into more bookings? It does! During the same period booking revenue increased by 32% compared to the previous year. That’s a pretty solid effect. Needles to say, but the client was extremely happy.
Photographs do sell! Not just saying ;-)
