For hotel marketers, the need to generate new topics and ideas for content is an ever-present challenge. Content marketing is, after all, a long-term commitment and one that requires near-constant attention and care in order to see results.
If you’re feeling uninspired and are struggling to come up with new ideas, we’ve got a handy technique you can use to get your creative content juices flowing. All you need to begin is one big and broad idea, theme or topic – we’ll explain how you take that and turn it into multiple original and distinctive pieces of content.
Start vague
Let’s say you need some ideas for your hotel blog. The first thing to do is to start as broadly as possible. At this early stages of blog content planning, you don’t want to deal in specifics. Instead, pick the most general theme for your hotel brand. For example, if your hotel is a family-friendly resort on the Costa Brava, then your broad idea may be ‘What to Do with Kids in the Costa Brava’. Or, if you work for a design-focused boutique hotel in London, then your broad topic may be ‘The Arts in London’.
Break it down
While these wide-reaching topics will no doubt work well as general, standalone posts, you will get significantly more bang for your brainpower if you think about breaking them down into multiple derivative forms of content.
The best way to do this is to start to separate your big idea into lots of smaller parts, and you can do this simply by asking yourself questions about your target customer. What might their budget be? Who will they be travelling with? What age are they? As you consider these, you’ll naturally find yourself narrowing down your broad overarching topic into lots of different plausible offshoot pieces. But this is merely the beginning.
Target your content
The next step towards increasing your options for spin-off content is to get more and more targeted.
Let’s take the ‘The Arts in London’ idea as an example. You can focus on different traveller budgets (cheap cultural attractions vs. splurge experiences), attractions (museums vs. performance venues), traveller types (solo traveller vs. family), neighbourhoods (South Bank vs. East London), categories (performance arts vs. visual arts) and genre preferences (street art vs. classical music). You could address the various cultural influences on London’s cultural scene (the influence of Caribbean culture on grime), give some background behind the most popular local artists or cultural institutions (the history of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre) or even create a cultural hotspot guide.
And target it again
The ‘What to Do with Kids in the Costa Brava’ may be more niche, but the same trick works just as well here. First, think of the variety of circumstances that could affect what families can do in the Costa Brava – that should help you hone your focus. You can cover certain sub-regions, take into account the seasons or the weather (what to do with kids in summer or what to do with kids when it rains) and factor in the age of the kids in question (keeping teenagers happy or toddlers entertained) as well as their interests (high-adrenaline vs. educational).
Remember your demographic
Just don’t forget your hotel’s target audience. If you’re a five-star hotel, you probably won’t want a ‘cheap eats vs. splurge dining’ option, as this isn’t a relatable choice for your audience. Having said that, if it were gently re-positioned as ‘street food vs. fine dining’, with a focus on high-quality and authentic street food, rather than ‘cheap eats’, this could still hold interest for a higher net worth client. It’s about delving deeper into the idea.
So next time you find yourself struggling with an idea, think about how you can narrow it down or make it more targeted. If you can run through each and every one of these steps each time you have a broad content idea, you will soon find that your single blog post has turned into a whole month’s worth of potential new pieces for your hotel blog.
