What Are Content Pillars And How To Use Them In Hotel Marketing
One of the simplest ways to approach marketing your hotel is to build around content pillars. But what are content pillars? And how do they apply to a hotel?
The reason I advocate for using content pillars is that they’re entirely audience-centric.
Your audience has a problem or need.
You and your hotel have the solution — so why not give it to them?
When you understand who your customer is and what they need, you can create marketing assets (for social media, email, etc.) that actually drive results.
In this post, I’ll walk you through the process of figuring out which content pillars make the most sense for your hotel.
No seriously, what the heck is a content pillar?
Glad you asked! The concept of a “content pillar” is based on the strategy of creating content around 5-6 key topics.
Think of your overall content output like the beautiful temple pictured above. Those columns — or pillars — are what hold the entire structure up.
One column alone isn’t going to do the job.
Your hotel business likely requires more than rooms revenue to operate. You also have meeting space, catering, maybe an on-site restaurant and bar, or even a spa.
For a hotel, your content pillars are sub-topics related to your unique business segments, for which you create and share content on different platforms like social media, a blog, your emails, and so on.
What are the benefits of using content pillars for a hotel?
Like I mentioned above, your property probably has multiple revenue streams. It’s not always about simply getting “heads in beds,” we also want to reach diners, meeting planners, wedding parties, and more.
That’s more than one kind of customer.
By sticking with a handful of key themes (your pillars), the content you create to market your hotel will be much more relevant and targeted to those customer personas.
What kind of content is helpful to an event planner while looking for a meeting venue? How about someone who lives locally and wants to find a great spot for brunch this weekend?
These are two different problems that your hotel could solve — and different problems require different content.
The benefit for hotels when choosing specific content pillars is that you’ll only create content that’s tailored to your exact customers.
Fresh out of content ideas for your hotel? You might like this video:
How do I choose the right content pillars for my hotel?
The easiest way to find the right content pillars for your hotel is to start with your primary revenue streams.
To use a simple example, let’s pretend we’re running a 300-room property in a city center. We have 5 conference-style meeting rooms and a nice rooftop event space that hosts weddings of 60-80 pax. Our ground floor restaurant doesn’t get a ton of foot traffic off the street but does a healthy number of covers thanks to in-house guests.
Four basic content pillars could be:
Rooms
Meetings
Weddings
Restaurant
Now, zoom out a little. Try to envision an individual customer for each.
What motivates them? What is the problem they’re looking to solve? What do you think their interests are outside of your hotel? What’s their profession? How about their age range? Do they live locally or come from somewhere else?
If you can answer these questions, congrats! You’ve just created an audience persona.
Now that you know what the audience avatar looks like for each content pillar, you can get to work creating content.
Here’s a great example of a buyer persona shared by HubSpot. Maybe Mary sounds like one of your hotel guests or corporate meeting planners?
What content should go into my hotel marketing plan?
“Content” is a really broad term.
Hotel content could include your social media posts, different sections of your website, a hotel blog, a podcast, an email newsletter, videos on your YouTube channel… honestly, the possibilities are endless and a little overwhelming.
Thankfully, you have your audience personas!
You know your customer better than anyone else. You understand their buying habits, the social media apps they prefer, and how they approach solving their problem.
That last one is key.
The decision journey for a bride-to-be is very different from someone looking for a place to have brunch this weekend. An executive assistant who needs to plan an important meeting for their boss will not take the same approach as a young traveler looking for a fun city break with friends.
The approach I recommend for my clients is tailored to those audience personas.
To reach customers with a longer buying journey, use a mix of search-optimized landing pages and strategic blogging. Create resources on your website that help those customers solve their problem.
Think: a wedding planning checklist for newly-engaged couples or a collection of itineraries for the perfect weekend in your destination.
(Psst… I’m linking a lot more ideas below.)
Read Next: 101 Hotel Content Marketing Ideas For Your Blog, Social Media & Emails
How do I create a plan using content pillars?
The best way to build out a hotel content plan is to visualize it as an editorial calendar.
There are all sorts of free or low-cost hotel marketing tools that help you with this.
My top two suggestions? If you’re a team of one, keep it super-simple with a Google Calendar. If you want a tool that helps you collaborate with other departments, try a proper project management system like Asana.
With either tool, you’ll want to use your pillars to start organizing and planning content.
Whether it’s a social post or a new article on your hotel blog, assign each pillar a color so you can easily see which business objective each piece of content aligns to. Simply add a placeholder for that content onto the calendar — you can always move things around as you see fit.
This simple approach is a great way to make sure you’re giving each audience persona a fair share of promotion.
Final Thoughts
That’s really all there is to it!
What did you think of this guide to creating content pillars? Will your hotel use this approach? Let me know in the comments below.
For a little more guidance, grab a copy of the free hotel marketing plan presentation template below.