Planning your hotel marketing budget for maximum returns

Welcome back to another edition of The Hotel Hype!

Today we will be finishing our three-part marketing budget planning series.

This is going to be a good one!

Table of Contents

• Planning your hotel marketing budget for maximum r …

• Look back at your promotional activity

• Planning the upcoming year

• Planning your spend

  • Stage 1

  • Stage 2

  • Stage 3

  • Stage 4

• Let’s summarise

Before we get started though… I’d like to give you a quick update on The Hotel Hype.

Since launching, it has been fantastic to see so many people signing up and hearing positive feedback. It has been a joy to see.

I want to make sure I can give you the standard of content you expect going forward, so a couple of things are going to change.

1. I am going to start posting biweekly. This gives me more time to ensure I can give each article the time they need. As we are getting into deeper topics, they are taking more time to prepare. This means I can still give you fully thought-through articles rather than high-level ones without the key details you need.

2. Biweekly guest posts. To ensure you are still receiving useful hotel marketing knowledge in my off weeks, I am going to start bringing some guests on to post. Experts I have either worked with, have spiked my interest at conferences or online. This will help diversify the knowledge and opinions on The Hotel Hype.

3. Creating short, quick-to-digest versions of posts. This one is still a maybe… but would a short read summarised version of articles be useful? You could then refer to the long version when you have the time or you think you need to deep dive into the topic. If this sounds of interest, reply to this email and let me know.

Right! Update done. Back to it!

Planning your hotel marketing budget for maximum returns

• Part 1 – we covered grouping your expenses to make the following articles make sense. If you missed this, make sure you go back and give it a read.

• Part 2 – we talked about changing your approach to your performance marketing budget. This one is potentially a game-changer for your business! Make sure you go back and give it a read.

• And this is part 3! We are going to go over how to ensure you are getting the best return for your marketing budget.

Let’s get stuck in!

Look back at your promotional activity

So this section is going to vary by if you are a brand or independent, economy or luxury. But overall, the principles are still the same.

The first thing you need to do is pull together all the different promotional or sales activities you have trialled over the past year. If you have been testing various offers (as you should…) you may want to pull the last two years of data.

The data you need to be pulling is as follows:

1. What offers did you run when? What was the offer? (30% off, free room upgrade etc). When did the sales run? (Booking start and end date.) What were the stay dates? (What dates could guests book a stay for).

2. Revenue data. How many bookings did you get over the sales period? How much was on the offer rate plan or discount code

3. What marketing activity did you do to promote the offers? Try and list the different things you tried for various offers. If it was a paid brand channel (see part 1) make sure you know what you spent.

4. How did these different marketing channels perform? Dive into your analytics and see how they performed.

   1. Start with Google Analytics (or whatever web analytics tool you use) and see which source/medium delivered the most traffic and bookings during the sales period.

   2. Then go to your marketing channels and see how they reported their performance. This is always going to vary due to different ways of attributing, but it is always good to have a second point to reference. The key metric you want to pull is ROAS (return on ad spend).

5. The final thing you need to get is your revenue by booking month over the year. This is at a top level regardless of promotion or not. You are likely going to have some seasonality.

I am aware there may be some terms used above not familiar to everyone. In the future, I am going to create a guide on all the various marketing lingo.

Once you have pulled this, lay it all out on an Excel spreadsheet. Depending on the amount of promotions you run, you can either do this by month or by week.

Put the promotion in the month, the information and the performance.

You then want to look over your lines to look for a few things. Start with the offers that drove the highest revenue and mark them as green. Aim for the top 25% of your promotions.