“This post is part of a new chapter for SlopeFillers that breaks the old anything-and-everything” topic lineup and organizes weekly posts into themes. This week is content marketing.”

When the idea of Destination Summit came up way back when, I was the only person on the Ryan Solutions team that thought it was a bad idea. The fact that I was dead wrong should be no surprise to you. The event was the best I attended all winter.

Against all logic and reason, they even gave me a session and let me choose a topic.

The topic became content marketing, and the panel was Halley O’Brien, David Amirault, Ethan Austin, and Krista Parry. They completely rocked it. And is there a better time to share such epic rockingness than during content week? I submit there is not.

Proof
Halley had a recording of the entire session, but the audio didn’t turn out so well for those that weren’t mic’ed up, so here’s her 5-minute recap of the session:

Here were the key takeaways.

Great content ________________.

• …begins with great storytelling (example).
• …is not about you, it’s about your community (example).
• …solves peoples’ problems (example).

Great distribution ________________.

• …is planned long before the content is created.
• …is multiplatform and goes far beyond social media.
• …matches content type to the expectations of the channel.

Great measurement ________________.

• …doesn’t get caught up in vanity metrics like “view count”.
• …answers “who are these people that are consuming my content?”
• …measures consumption, sharing, lead gen, and sales.

To sum things up in my own words I’d say this. Solve the problems people have when coming to your resort, stop talking about yourself and focus on the stories of your guests, plan distribution strategy long before the creation process ever starts, stop hiding behind vanity metrics. and ask yourself who these viewers/readers/etc. really are and use that honest assessment to improve the next piece of content you create.

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.