What Are The Benefits of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy?

Most marketing professionals understand that documenting their strategy is an integral stage in achieving targets and running successful campaigns. The problem is that, according to the Content Marketing Institute, just 37% of B2B marketers do it and only 40% of B2C.

One of the key factors in documenting your content marketing strategies is that you are more likely to review and think about what you are doing at regular intervals. This is goal setting, pure and simple. You list what you want to achieve and tick off your successes, constantly evolving your strategy for where you want to be in the future.

The fact that so many of us are not documenting on a regular basis points to the potential that many hotel marketing strategies could well be based on ad hoc plans rather than a coherent whole, specifically designed to reach set goals.

What Does Documenting Mean for Your Business?

It can be tempting when you’ve been working in the business for a long while to convince yourself that you know what you’re doing. Writing down your hotel marketing strategies in a comprehensive and strategic way, however, means you have an easy to understand digital ‘paper’ trail of what has been created and how it has worked.

Strategies that are carefully documented can certainly be better measured and analysed. All this puts you on the path to making smarter decisions when it comes to future content marketing efforts. That also means your provision, in the short and long term, is likely to be less static. You will benefit from easier collaboration with other team members and get the fresh input needed when looking for new ideas for your content marketing strategies.

While dealing with stakeholders, you’ll also find that a well-documented strategy makes explanations and future planning much easier – you already have a road map to follow and one that is simple to understand.

Creating a Content Marketing Document

The first task you’ll face is to choose the right format for your document. There are quite a few options out there from Google Docs to Excel Spreadsheets and much will depend on how much you want people to collaborate and what sort of information you decide to provide.

You need to clearly define your main hotel marketing strategies so that people who use the document can quickly see what the goals are. What success looks like is also important but you should also include what hasn’t worked in the past. The KPIs and metrics you use to measure success need to be clear from the outset but reviewed and updated regularly so that you have the right parameters in place.

Then there are key insights that will inform your content marketing strategies including defining your audience, motivations and aspirations. You need to define how content marketing and, in particular, what kind of content, is going to help your hotel business move forward and grow. You should put together an editorial calendar with objectives and keywords and publishing dates. Finally, you must decide who is going to be responsible for delivering the content and how often it is going to be produced.

Hotel marketing is often complex and multi-faceted so it’s all the more important to have a robust process in place for documenting content creation. Without it, collaboration and measurement are difficult and planning for the future becomes a case of pot luck rather than goal setting success.