Then, you can get started. HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference Stephanie Smith, of Cogwheel, spoke on June 17 to try and change the mindset of how most hotel marketing budgets have been created.
There are 3 different ways to set up a marketing budget for a hotel:
1 – Too Little – Take last year’s budget and add 10%
2 – Too Much – Take your top line forecast then budget 3-8% towards marketing
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3 – Just Right – Follow the following steps to property justify a targeting hotel marketing budget
The steps to creating a hotel marketing budget
If you do not follow this framework, as a commercial hotel team, then you will never solve problems or achieve team goals. If we don’t, then we will be left with trying to spread dollars thinly among too many tactics.
1 – Define Gaps and Goals
2 – Determine a Strategy (as a team)
3 – Solve with Specific Tactics
4 – Allocate funds and budgets
Stephanie went through 6 scenarios for commercial strategies and showed how to prepare marketing plans based on them. Hotel marketers should plan to address each of these sales or revenue gaps.
Each scenario is a walk-through of the above steps to demonstrate how different strategies or budgets could be used in order to solve specific gaps or reach certain goals.
- Scenario #1: Our market has a high saturation of hotels with the same brand.
- Scenario 2 : The group PACE has been reduced, and we are now relying on transients in certain quarters.
- Scenario 3 : The market demand has weakened, and everyone is fighting for the same business
- Scenario #4: We recently rebranded a hotel. RAMP has been slow. No one knows the new name.
- Scenario #5: It’s the middle month and we won’t be able meet the budget for this month.
- Scenario six: The profit is low because of OTA commissions.
Please review the entire presentation to see sample strategies, tactics, and budgets used in solving against these scenarios:
HSMAI_Indianapolis_Cogwheel_Marketing
Last but not least, there is a chart that shows digital marketing KPIs – not just ROAS – and a cheatsheet to align the customer experience funnel with their aligned strategies, KPIs, and costs.
