Ep. 07: How to build a marketing ecosystem.
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In this episode, I’m sharing a major secret to success for my hotel clients—a strategy that I use to share clear, consistent stories across all digital marketing channels. It streamlines my work flow, it engages guests continuously, and ultimately, it converts.
The strategy is really quite simple—the trouble is, marketers get so caught up in the marketing channel—instead of focusing on the message. Today, I’m going to take the guesswork out of marketing messaging across channels, and provide you with a concrete example to help you build your very own marketing ecosystem.
This episode is inspired by a question from my client, and before we dive in, I wanted to offer a place for you to ask questions, too. I’ve created a Facebook group where independent hotel owners, marketing experts, and travel writers, can co-mingle, ask, and answer questions, and share ideas. Join the Facebook group, here..
The question.
Ok, so now, let’s dive into your content marketing ecosystem, and that question posed by my client, who runs an award-winning eco-lodge in Belize.
“So, here's a question when it comes to social posts,” my client asked, “Should I be thinking of theming them week by week, or is that better for stories? For example, should I be planning a week about the our farm-to-table program, or should I be changing it up daily to highlight a little bit of everything we do on property?”
I had a simple answer, with a pretty complex explanation. The glaring thing for me is that social media isn’t stand alone. Neither is email, or your website for that matter. Ad campaigns aren’t stand alone either. They all tie back to your content marketing strategy. They all tie back to a central theme.
Remember that it takes people six or more impressions for a single message to sink in. That’s why we see the same commercials on TV, or why Nordstroms chases us around the internet until we buy the damn shoes. Advertisers know this, and the same rule applies to content marketing strategy.
Use all marketing channels, but only one marketing strategy.
In today’s incredibly distracting world, with phones in our hands, and a live stream of just about anything imaginable truly at our fingertips—the need for strong, impactful, and consistent messaging cannot be understated.
My rule: use all of the marketing channels at your disposal to share bits and pieces of your content marketing strategy, one story at a time.
The beautiful thing is you don’t need an individual content marketing strategy for every marketing channel. In fact, if you spin your wheels trying to accomplish this, you’re going to need a huge team to run five different content marketing strategies across five different marketing channels. That’s way too many messages for an already distracted audience. Instead, why not give them something to really chew on, for a while?
There’s a better way that will not only save you time and precious resources, but also communicate your story more effectively, by operating with one content marketing strategy across all channels.
That means if you’re promoting a summer vacation package, you’re finding ways to tell that story across all of your digital marketing channels.
You’ve got your story, and now you can think about how it’s told on each individual channel.
The example.
So, let’s just go with this story example—the summer vacation package. I know we’re all dreaming of this right now, let’s hope it can happen. Here’s what that single story might look like across all marketing channels:
On your website, you include a banner on your homepage or a featured image, linking to your summer vacation package landing page. That page gets right down to business with a link to book, but it also includes some supplemental details—rooms that are great for families, things to do on property, and things to do nearby that feel distinctly like summer activities, right? Maybe you’ve built two additional landing pages—summer things that open up on property and summer activities outside of your door—to support that summer vacation package.
Great, your landing pages are set up, now it’s time to email your customers. Are you going to email them about the summer vacation package? Heck yes, you are! And you’re going to be strategic. First of all, you’re going to segment your list, find everyone who stayed with you last summer, and if you don’t already have an automation campaign running, you’re going to create an email inviting them back again.
You’ll send a second email to the rest of your list—your email subscribers and past guests who haven’t stayed in the summer, and you’re going to share all of the wonderful activities and things to do in the summer along with a link to your landing pages that clicks through to your booking engine.
Done and done!
Next, you go over to social, and you’re going to focus on this same story—that’s right, the summer vacation package, but you’re going to do it a bit differently. On social, you can use user generated content, photos your guests shared from last summer, to give viewers on social a tiny twinge of FOMO (fear of missing out) to convince them to click through and plan their own vacation.
Your social feed shouldn’t feel overly curated. In fact, the less curated it feels, the more relatable it becomes in the hearts and minds of your guests. An image that represents your ideal customers—like an actual family eating ice cream on your hotel’s patio—sends a very strong message on social media.
You can mix things up on social, especially if you’ve been tasked with posting multiple times a week or every day. This can feel like a lot of content, and I know personally what a struggle it can be. My advice is to mix things up. If your focus is the summer vacation package, maybe you’ll share the family eating ice cream on Monday. On Tuesday, you’ll share an adorable dog in a pet friendly room. On Wednesday, you’ll share a photo of a bbq grill or s’mores roasting. On Thursday, maybe you’re going to share a family road trip playlist. And on Friday, maybe it’s another user-generated photo or a recipe for frosé. See what I mean about mixing it up while still holding onto that central theme?
Save the overly staged stuff for brochures and sales sheets, and make your social media feed relatable.
You can also use a video, or a slide show easily on social media to attract more eyes.
You can hop on Facebook and throw a few bucks down and run a look-a-like campaign with your list of guests from last summer.
Social media helps us make meaningful connections with our customers, especially now more than ever, and it’s a chance to make one more impression that could ultimately lead to a sale.
Don’t get too hung up on social media. If you remember that it should always tie back into the rest of your content marketing strategy, it will become less overwhelming.
If you’re doing paid and display advertising, you want to make sure to update your ads with this summer vacation package content, too. All of this adds up to one cohesive message across all of your marketing channels.
Can you feel that energy? That consistency in messaging? That strong story that’s being told? It’s like those Nordstroms ads that never give up. It’s the pair of shoes you eventually end up buying.
When it comes to content marketing strategy, you can start to see how having one central strategy each month is all you need to tell a very rich story across all of your digital channels. The story comes first. The way you tell it, channel by channel, comes second.
Think about your content marketing strategy as an ecosystem. Your central theme is going to feed each of your marketing channels. They’re all working off of the same ideas, and when you take them one to the next, to the next, you’re able to tell this lush, full, well-rounded story. It’s dynamic, it has many different levels, but it’s all fed by this central idea.
The marketing ecosystem.
So, back to my client’s question, and my simple answer. I have hotels that handle social media both ways. Some run it separate from everything else, others integrate it into their content strategy. As you now know, I believe in sharing one continuous story around a central idea.
When you start to think about your content marketing this way—telling one story at a time, instead of trying to check off every box every week—you can see how even more content can develop out of this strategy.
The content you’re creating on a single subject for multiple channels and over multiple days, lends itself to yet another piece of content: a blog post on the same subject which can get even more eyes over to your website. See? You’ve just created even more content to help you sell that summer vacation package.
When it comes to marketing for hotels, I typically build out content marketing ecosystems based on a monthly or seasonal theme—social media is one small piece of that ecosystem. Within that month or season, all of the marketing channels pull from that central story.
So, how does your content marketing strategy fit into your overall marketing plan? It’s certainly a part of the marketing plan, but it’s more fluid, more responsive, and more in tune with the moment.
I think we can all see the value in the ability to be fluid in our marketing plans, especially now.
Let’s be brutally honest here. Even before COVID-19, marketing plans tended to fly out the window right around spring break every year. Tell me I’m wrong here. If you actually use, and reflect back on your marketing plan past Q1, I’d love to hear from you. Especially if your marketing plan lives in an Excel sheet, and you know what, even if you use something fancier than that.
For so many marketers, we spend most of the fall season writing our marketing plans, and the early part of winter fine tuning them, before finally coming to consensus a week after the first of the year. We spend months building marketing plans that end up on a shelf. They’re not living documents, they’re relics. Plans we’d hope to achieve until some other program, some higher up request, some new development, or worst of all, a pandemic shows up and changes all of our well-meaning marketing plans.
Not anymore. Our marketing plans need room to breathe, react and respond…so they’re relevant. Marketing plans are no longer evergreen, and truthfully, they never really were in the first place.
That’s why I invite you to adopt the thinking behind my marketing ecosystem for your hotel. This allows you to spend one or two days per month, setting a strategy around one major idea, which can then become the basis for your content across all of your marketing channels. Remember: your marketing ecosystem is alive. It needs to be looked after, watered, and maintained. It changes monthly, or seasonally, and it sets you up for stronger, more consistent messaging and storytelling—content that converts.
If you’ve opened up your marketing plan recently and thought, “but none of this is relevant anymore,” I invite you to take things one season—and one story—at a time. You can download the exact worksheet I use with my hotels to plan monthly and seasonal content across their digital marketing channels.
Now, I haven’t filled it in yet, because that’s up to you. You’ll want to tweak it to include all of the digital marketing channels you’re responsible for, and make it your own.
Once you have this one or two page plan in place, you’ll be ready to face the month and weeks ahead, with a content strategy that’s more fluid, more focused, and a lot more fun to carry out.
Best of all, by focusing on one central idea at a time, across all of your digital channels, you’ll be sharing a robust story, instead of a disjointed one. A story that inspires, connects, and convinces your customers to come back to see you, again and again.
If you have questions, comment below, or join the “How To Share” Facebook Group. I can’t wait to hear from you.
As always, keep sharing those stories—one at a time, across all of your channels!
