Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai. Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai.

These days, it sometimes seems like every hotel, restaurant, bar, and fast food joint in the Middle East is on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook pages range from the awesome (e.g. facebook.com/InterContinentalDubaiFestivalCity ) to the ‘not bad at all’ (e.g. facebook.com/table9dubai), to the plain ridiculous (e.g. facebook.com/doner.kebab.dubai).

Blogs, on the other hand, appear to be mostly neglected by companies in our part of the world. Compared to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, blogging is a bit like potion lessons in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: “There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class”.

As such, I don't expect many of you to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is blogging. However, for those select few, who possess the predisposition... I can teach you how to tell the story of your hotel or restaurant and create guest and customer interactions.

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I can tell you how to get to know your business better, achieve hyper-focused and hyper-targeted segmentation of your company’s different buyer ‘personas’, and even considerably help with your search engine optimisation efforts and generate referrals to your website.”

A blog, in other words, should be an essential part of your social and digital marketing strategies and generally sits very well between your more ‘casual’ social media platforms like your Facebook page and your more corporate internet outposts like your official website.


Here are five compelling reasons to get started today:
 1. Setting up a blog is (relatively) cheap and quick: Most blogging software is available free of charge, e.g. Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and can easily be installed on your web server or you can choose a ‘cloud hosted’ solution.

All these services come with a large number of customisable themes, which allow you to quickly change the style of your blog to fit in with your overall corporate design guidelines.

2. Blogging regularly will make search engines fall in love with you: By and large, search engines love fresh content. You probably won’t update your website every week (bar changing the room pricing, perhaps), because it’s generally a hassle and often involves web-designers or getting to grips with your site’s content management system.

Updating a blog, in contrast, is very quick and poses no major technical challenges (if you can use Microsoft Word, you can post a blog post on most major blogging platforms). An hour a week is all it takes to provide Google and co. with fresh content and make it easier for internet users to find out more about your hotel, restaurants or bar.

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