Sometimes in marketing you find folks who are all-in on one medium or another. They’ll either do a podcast or a blog, or a blog instead of video, etc.

What I love about the written word, though, is that it makes creating content relatively easy. There’s not equipment to setup or crews to schedule or technology to wrangle. It still requires research, time, and effort, but just not as much of those latter two items as other things. But I also rarely, if ever, think about writing as the end of the road.

Because do know what written stories are also really good at? Showing you which stories have legs and would be worth of some video-level investment.

Deer Valley

The other day Nick Como shared a blog post he wrote for Deer Valley about grooming. It really was one of the best, most well-researched blog posts I’ve seen in on a resort blog in a long time.

Nick has been around the industry for a while, so when he says points out how much he learned while writing it you know he put in the work to do it right.

Having worked in the ski industry for a good chunk of years – many at a resort – I was surprised how little I knew about the grooming process. Writing this content for @Deer_Valley was a great learning experience for me, and hopefully other skiers.https://t.co/xc6CLzLvB2

— Nick Como (@NickDIY) March 10, 2022

But let’s tie this back to where we started.

Blog → Video (etc.)

Now, in this case Deer Valley also released a companion video to go with this blog post. The video, I must say, is extremely well done.

But what if you don’t have the budget to invest in that kind of video up front? No worries, write the blog anyway.

Because let’s say that next year or the year after that Deer Valley decided to up their video game or start a podcast or create a magazine or do anything that requires putting a lot of effort into a few great stories. If you’re going to put that much effort into something, wouldn’t it be nice to know you’ve got a great story to begin with? That it won’t dead end? That people would love to hear and share and engage with that story?

Well, even if you only have a half dozen blog posts like this one, you have everything you need – simple stories and engagement metrics for each – to confidently know which ones are worthy of a stronger medium.

Not the End, the Beginning

The move I’ve written the more I’ve realized how well suited blogging is to creating a pipeline of stories for more engaging, higher-cost media like video or print.

If you think about it this way, consistently writing about what happens on your mountain will not only help engage someone of your audience throughout the year, but it will also give you objective data about which of those stories might be the best ones to use for that video campaign you know you need.

If you’ve got the budget and confidence to do both at the same time? Awesome.

But if not? Write the post anyway and use that to see if you’ve got a story with enough value to take it to a bigger medium. Great work by Deer Valley and Nick on all fronts.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.