What should your hotel’s documented content marketing strategy actually include?

Documenting your content marketing strategy helps you to keep track of what’s been delivered, how it has performed and allows you to set and achieve strong goals for your hotel business. But what, exactly, should you be putting in that editorial spreadsheet or digital document if you want your strategy to be successful?

Here’s our quick guide on what to include:

What Are the Big Questions?

The first step to creating great hotel marketing solutions is asking the right questions. These not only help you to set the best goals, they inform the choices for your document. First, step back and consider why you are using content marketing for your hotel business in the first place. Who are you attempting to reach out to? How do you want them to respond? Where does you content fit into your other strategies for marketing? Finally, how are you going to meaningfully measure any success?

What is Your Content Doing?

This is really your mission statement. You may be surprised to learn that many marketers produce ‘content’ simply because they think they should be doing it. They don’t drill down deeper than this and therefore they don’t really understand the true purpose of their content. Are you attempting to build brand awareness for your hotel guests? Perhaps you want to broaden things out to promote the general location and advertise what an exciting place it is to spend some time? Maybe you’re a hotel that hosts businesses and events and you want to boost your credentials in this area.

Research Your Audience

The next thing you need to include is your audience. Who are they? What are they interested in? For hotels this can mean a range of different people from families and business executives to couples who’ve just got married and friends who out for a good time. One of the keys to hotel marketing solutions nowadays is how you provide a personalised marketing strategy for your guests that works. The more research and thought you put into this section, the clearer your content marketing goals will become.

Your Content Plan

First, you have to come up with suitable content and then you have to order it and schedule those articles, videos, emails and social media posts so that they work together and produce the desired effect. This is where something like a CRM comes in useful because it allows you get an overview of what’s going on, what’s planned for the future and the impact your content is having in real time. You may have a whole range of hotel marketing solutions that need to be brought together, including:

• Hotel website blog posts.
• Guest contributions and reviews.
• Email marketing and landing pages.
• Social media engagement.
• Paid media such as Facebook Ads.

Consistency is the key here and building trust with your audience is paramount. That can’t be achieved if you don’t understand your goals or how you are going to achieve them. Some hotel marketing solutions are looking for an immediate effect – for instance, when you are advertising a special offer – others take time to bed in such as building your reputation and brand identity with blog posts and reviews.

Your editorial calendar is the key tool for keeping track of this and lists what, when and why you are publishing marketing content.

The Metrics of Content Marketing

As with any marketing initiative, you don’t want to spend your time on activities that are not giving you a decent ROI. Including measurements and successes, as well as the failures, in your content marketing document gives you a clear idea of what works and what doesn’t, what needs to be changed or tweaked and where you should focus your attention in the future.

Above all, creating a documented content strategy should not be viewed as a static process. This is meant to be a living document that changes as your goals develop and refine and as new technology and solutions come onto the market, eventually allowing you to be highly responsive to what is happening within your customer’s environment.