Have you been driving yourself to exhaustion going from writing blogs, keeping up with social media, and developing other content for your vacation rental property? Are you struggling to see results from your efforts? Developing your content marketing campaign will not only help you preserve your sanity when it comes to content creation, it allows you to communicate with and engage prospects more effectively than doing whatever comes to mind when you feel the need to put something out there. Breaking it down into steps makes creating your strategy for your content as easy as putting a puzzle together.

1. The Big Picture

Study the big picture. What is the image of your properties you want to communicate to guests? If your vacation rental is like a movie you want people to be craving to see, then your content is the movie clips pieced together to make the movie trailer. Each clip is motivating on its own, but it’s the way they work together that will get heads in beds. Understanding your target personas determines how you will package your clips or content to appeal to them.

2. Strategy

What types of content will you be creating? You’ll need content for marketing offers and ongoing content to keep contacts engaged. How many and what kind of offers will you have? How frequently will you be publishing blog posts? How will you handle social media engagement? Do you need to delegate so content management doesn’t take up all of your time? These are some of the questions you need to consider when developing your content marketing campaign.

3. Framework

A 1,000 piece puzzle thought of as individual pieces can be overwhelming. Starting with the frame is the logical place to start. This is going to be a schedule of when you are going to create, deliver and follow-up on particular types of content. It is much easier to arrange the interior pieces, or topics, once you have the framework complete. I like to use an agenda with monthly, weekly and daily pages to help me keep track of the schedule.

4. Brainstorm Ideas

Once you have a schedule set for content management, it’s time to brainstorm topic ideas. You can pull inspiration from community events, your favorite local places, favorite activities and any other topic that will be contributing to the big picture you are working towards. Once you have organized your topics into clusters for a cohesive picture within the big picture, you can assign them to places in your schedule.

5. Cohesion

The final part of developing your content marketing campaign is a final review. Is there a piece that would fit better someplace else? Do you have any holes? Is it the picture you wanted to show the world?

Just as your inbound marketing campaign needs structure, your content marketing campaign needs structure. Having an intentional approach to content creation allows you optimize its impact by creating a cohesive picture for your prospects.