You can also find out more about the HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference Stephanie Smith, of Cogwheel, spoke on June 17 to try and change the mindset about how most hotel marketing budgets have been created in a backwards manner.
There are three different ways to set up a marketing budget for a hotel:
- Too Little – Take last year’s budget and add 10%
- Too Much – Take your top line forecast then budget 3-8% towards marketing
- Just Right – Follow the following steps to property justify a targeting hotel marketing budget
How to Create a Budget for Hotel Marketing
You will never achieve your team goals or solve problems if you don’t follow this framework. We are forced to spread our dollars too thinly across different tactics.
- Identify gaps and goals
- As a team, determine a strategy
- Solve Specific Problems with Specific Techniques
- Budgets and funds allocation
Sample Hotel Commercial Scenarios and How to Solve with Hotel Digital Marketing
Then, Stephanie walked through 6 different commercial strategy scenarios and how to plan against them for marketing. Each of these gaps or goals are generally sales or revenue problems that hotel marketers need to plan to help solve.
In each scenario, we walk through the steps above to see how different strategies and budgets can solve various gaps or achieve specific goals.
- Scenario 1: Our market is heavily saturated with hotels of the same brand, we are not getting our fair share
- Scenario 2: Group PACE has dropped, so we are relying more on transient in specific quarters
- Scenario 3: Demand in the market has softened, everyone is fighting over the same business
- Scenario 4:We have a newly rebranded hotel, RAMP is slow, no one knows us as the new name.
- Scenario 5: It is the middle of the month, and we are not going to meet this month’s budget.
- Scenario 6: Profit is low due to OTA commissions.
To see the sample strategies, tactics and budgets used to solve against these scenarios, please review the entire deck presented at the conference:
Last but not least, there is a chart that shows digital marketing KPIs – not only ROAS – and a cheatsheet to align the customer experience funnel with their aligned strategies, KPIs, and costs.
Cogwheel Marketing
Cogwheel Marketing™️ is a full service digital marketing agency specializing in branded hotels, first leveraging brand systems then coupling that with supplemental strategies to maximize total online presence. The reporting and business intelligence tools, Cogwheel AnalyticsData from different sources is aggregated to help companies identify trends and opportunities for their online presence. Our clearly defined processes will ensure your hotel’s best position against your competitors as well as other hotels from the same brand. We will work with your revenue management and sales teams to close any gaps and identify your ideal customers.
