A Guide to Content Marketing: Growing Influential Wedding and Hospitality Brands
The key to building the kind of brand that your community craves?
Consistency and authenticity.
Business opportunities do not hinge on the aesthetic of your Instagram feed, media hits or references - which were powerful forces in years past. Today, people want to identify with a brand before they buy. Once way to achieve this is through content creation.
There are three kinds of content: owned (assets you create) , earned (media placements, blog contributions with other brands) and paid (advertisements). We believe authentic brands are built on all three - when used intentionally - but the first and fundamental type of content we hope you’ll integrate is earned content. Earned content can help you articulate your insights, validate your position in the market and nurture your community - all at once.
To make your efforts go farther, turn one singular piece of content into many small, bite-sized pieces of ‘content confetti’ blanketing the atmosphere (a fun visual that makes complete sense). The concept is one asset reaching many. By sharing something of value on multiple channels, each with a distinct audience and in a specific presentation, you’re able to captivate and nurture your community in a way that feels intentional.
We like to think of it as ‘micro content’ so that it feels more digestible when you’re creating it and when you’re consuming it, as a client.
This post will help you understand the intent and application behind creating owned content and some ideas to inspire your individual strategy.
PHOTO: CHRISTINA MCNEIL
Understand: Valuable, relevant, and consistent content has the ability to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. But it starts with understanding the needs and wants of those you crave connection with. Is it to be Empowered? Educated? Motivated? Do they want to feel like they belong, or they are getting access to something special? Then, get clear about challenges they are faced with, and how you can solve them. Finally, research where they are spending their time. Once you have this framework you can confidently move onto creation and distribution.
Create: Lean into your safe space; the written word, video or audio. Blog content is here to stay. It’s simply in the facts: businesses that publish regular blog content receive 8x more website traffic and blog content assists in achieving 3x more leads. Recently, in our Guide to Becoming a Digital-First Wedding or Hospitality Brand we shared the importance of brand voice. In such a visual industry, a blog is the perfect place to house your portfolio while building a compelling narrative and sense of personality with your community on a platform you have complete control over. Likewise, building a house of videos showcasing your work in action can validate your expertise and prove your technical skills which can be incredibly useful to have on hand in the new business process.
Distribute: Now comes the fun part - breaking these assets up into digestible value-forward content that serves a distinct purpose when and where your audience needs it most. These are just some initial ideas to consider.
Long form written blogs can appear as short snippets in your email newsletter, broken up into caption for Instagram, a post on LinkedIn. Remember to link out to partners you’ve worked with as it provides even more value for your readers and community.
A video (or a series) should find its way to a Youtube or Vimeo channel. A single video, edited thoughtfully, can be turned into short-form social media content. If you’re trying to build a mentorship, consulting or education side of the brand don’t forget that leveraging webinar content is also very powerful when brought onto social in a digestible ‘teaser.’
A podcast episode could be transcribed which, alone is a wonderful written asset for your blog. Then, you can follow a repeatable process for other written pieces of content. Things start to become standard procedure once you get in the habit of creating!
Measure: In order to make content work for your brand long-term, you’ll need to analyze and measure the impact of your efforts (similarly to what you do for your larger marketing plan). That way you can make real-time changes when it matters most, and not waste your efforts. We recommend quarterly reviews of all your content. Revisit your content plan and see what needs to be adjusted, or what performed best so that you have clarity on where you should be allocating your digital advertising budget.