Hospitality is a multi-faceted experience. Everything from the booking process to the on-site amenities to customer service affects a guest’s impression of a property after checking out. No operational department exists in a silo, and they all work together to create a guest experience greater than the sum of its parts.
This mindset shouldn’t just apply to operations — sales also can benefit from taking a more holistic approach. Traditional sales tactics, such as cold calling, often aren’t strong enough to move the needle for the experience-focused properties that have taken over the industry. The solution: A campaign that leverages both marketing and revenue management to create emotional resonance, builds trust in your property or portfolio and serves as the catalyst to sales.
By leveraging the expertise of their marketing and revenue colleagues, hotel sales teams can develop and continuously update campaigns that drive audience engagement and, ultimately, occupancy and revenue.
Here’s how to start.
Tell your story
Stories are at the heart of every marketing-driven sales strategy, and any marketing team worth their salt will be able to work with their sales team to develop one that drives business. A hotel's story should lean into the little details that make a property unique and answer questions like: “What sets the property apart?;” “How does the property reflect the local market and culture?;” and “What lasting impressions will guests walk away with?” If available, the story should incorporate guest testimonials to build trust and credibility. Guests will heed the opinions of other guests.
It’s also critical that you have compelling visual content to accompany your verbiage. Invest in high-quality photography and videography – it helps your campaign stand out and shows what exactly guests can expect when they visit your property.
Finally, as you flesh out your story, be sure that you have a clear understanding of your mission, brand attributes and target audience. This foundation should guide all your sales and marketing efforts.
Find the right audience
Developing your story is only part one of a successful unified marketing campaign. Next, you need to make sure that story finds the right audience. Not all platforms fit all properties, and hotel sales teams need to find which one works best for their story and their budget. Some hotels might have great success with social media platforms and online ads, others will get a great response to email marketing, and still others will see a greater return on investment from print media.
Key to finding the right platform is understanding what each one brings to the table. Social media is great for brand awareness, but it has not become a direct booking engine quite yet. Email marketing can deepen engagement with existing and potential guests by making them aware of new amenities or special promotions. Digital ads can use geo-targeting to reach potential guests based on their proximity to points of interest. Raines has used geofencing marketing ads to drive direct walk-ins to specific properties. For a new property, this is great exposure and allows the sales team to directly target customers already staying in the market.
Print media, like magazines, is often underutilized by hotel advertisers. Recently, Raines launched its “Curiosity” campaign, directly targeting customers through major publications to take action and drive direct business. Having an advertisement in a trusted publication drove demand to our properties, and our website traffic jumped significantly.
Finally, don’t stop telling your story just because guests are on property. Hoteliers can leverage in-house guest messaging to boost incremental revenue by promoting on-property amenities like restaurants, spas and activities. The guests already in your hotel are still a valuable audience!
Track, Measure, Pivot
When you launch your campaign, you need to know what success looks like. This varies by platform, so familiarize yourself with the different key performance indicators (KPIs) so you know when a sales strategy is working and when you may need to pivot.
In terms of the campaign itself, you should monitor impressions, clicks, interaction and engagement. From a revenue standpoint, you’re looking for growth in direct booking, return on ad spend and ROI. The sales team should make a point of conducting monthly and quarterly reviews of a campaign’s performance.
They should also be quick to shift tactics when metrics are not meeting expectations.
Each property should have its own set of KPIs customized to its unique sales goals. If you’re new to marketing campaigns, work with your team to build an initial baseline of what to track and how to assess early performance without any concrete comparison. This is also where revenue comes in. The revenue team can help measure ROI across the campaign, giving sales and marketing the data they need to drive the campaign’s success.
Build your team
Not every property is staffed with sales, marketing and revenue teams. Sometimes, those teams are shared across a portfolio. Other times, the property is too small to warrant a dedicated marketing team. There are other ways to bring marketing into the fold if you’re a sales director without a dedicated marketing team.
You could work with third-party companies to develop your campaign or manage aspects of your distribution, such as social media or email marketing. There are PR firms that can connect you with influencers that have ties to the local travel community. This isn’t free, but ROI is strong.
Final thoughts
A holistic approach to marketing, sales and revenue is necessary to compete in today’s extremely competitive market. Every hotel, regardless of size, can build and execute effective marketing campaigns. Sales directors must abandon the “I’m not a marketing person” mindset. Now they have to be.
Stephanie Atkisson is senior vice president of commercial strategies at Raines.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.