What Should Your Hotel’s Documented Content Marketing Strategy Really Include?

Content marketing is a hugely influential marketing technique for hoteliers, offering the chance to showcase the best your hotel has to offer and demonstrate your expertise in the hospitality industry. However, it’s important to keep track of your content marketing efforts – and this is achieved by creating a documented content marketing strategy.

There’s another reason for documenting your strategy too – Research by the Content Marketing Institute shows that just 37% of brands have a documented strategy, meaning the majority of your competition might not either. 59% of marketers in the Content Marketing Institute trend report stated that their organization was unsure what effective content marketing looks like – creating a competitive advantage for those who do document their content marketing strategy.

You probably already know you should have a clear content marketing strategy and that you should be documenting this strategy to help gage your success – but there’s a difference between knowing you should be doing something, and knowing how to do it.

In order to make your strategy worthwhile, it’s vital to find answers to the biggest questions your hotel marketing team faces. Who are you trying to reach? What is the overall goal of your content marketing? How will success be measured? Starting out with a clear understanding of how these questions will be addressed and sets the stage for a successful measurement plan comprised of:

1. Your Big Goals

Why are you investing time and energy into your content marketing strategy? Unless you have a clearly defined answer to this question, it’s time to revisit the drawing board until you do. A strategy which doesn’t take account of the wider goals of your project is no strategy at all, so there’s much more work to do deciding what your hotel is seeking to achieve before you reach the point of being able to develop a strategy to achieve it. Your goal might be increasing your ROI, or boosting bookings, or drawing more custom through your own booking engine. Whatever the purpose, make it a centrepiece of your content marketing strategy to help guide all the other elements of your document and keep your efforts on the right track.

2. Hotel Guest Personas

You need to know your hotel guests very well in order to create content which will suit their needs. Before beginning any activity, ensure you understand the specific guest segments you are seeking to target through researching and developing detailed buyer personas.

3. An Editorial Calendar and Distribution Plan

Knowing when you’ll be scheduling content and where you’ll be distributing it are vital considerations for any hotel marketer, so mapping out deadlines and deciding when and where you’ll be publishing the content you produce should be foremost among your hotel marketing solutions.

4. A System of Measurement

How will you measure your ROI against the big goals you outlined at the start of the process? Setting benchmarks and charting your activities can seem time consuming, and initially it might be – but it also sets you up for bigger and better results from your content marketing output.