This is an article from Tambourine
With Labor Day behind us, the dust has settled from your summer season and you’re just now beginning to think of the rest of the year ahead. Before you get swept up in end-of-year chaos and coming up with holiday hotel marketing campaigns, September is the opportune time to set the foundation for your success in 2017.
Get smart about planning ahead.
Here are five must-do tasks to ramp up for your 2017 revenue goals
#1 Evaluate the True Needs of Your Hotel Business Mix
We often see hotels that invest too much of their marketing focus and resources on attracting leisure business. Meanwhile, their corporate sales and group sales teams are left having to hastily create disjointed lead campaigns on their own.
The biggest irony of this common situation is that a single corporate or group business contract promises hundreds of bookings and larger ancillary spending, while leisure marketing campaigns drive reservations one-by-one.
Don’t ignore the biggest spenders. Instead, look at what your corporate sales’ and group sales’ goals are and create an integrated marketing strategy that aims to help them achieve those numbers, in addition to your leisure campaigns.
#2 Prepare a Hotel Marketing Budget That Aligns to Your 2017 Revenue Goals
By now, your management or ownership team have met and begun to map out their revenue targets for 2017. If you haven’t already, ask them specifically what part of that revenue pie you and your hotel marketing team are responsible for.
Don’t move forward on a budget without knowing exactly what goals your team is beholden to. Get as much clarification as you can, including how many room nights, booked meetings, corporate bookings, etc. should be attributed to your marketing efforts.
A common mistake hotel marketers make when creating a marketing budget is they simply just ask for the same amount as the current year. Here’s the problem: Your hotel owners will likely have an expectation for your team to do even better and to produce even more than this year.
So, it makes no sense to ask for the same amount when now, you are being held accountable for achieving so much more!
Read rest of the article at Tambourine
