What every ACCOM provider should be doing before 2016 ends
This week, we found an important article on five must-do tasks to ramp up your 2017 revenue goals:
1. Evaluate the true needs of your hotel’s business mix
We often see hotels investing much of their marketing focus and resources on attracting leisure business, while their corporate sales and group sales teams are left having to hastily create disjointed lead campaigns. 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. The article advices to not to 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
At this stage, your management or ownership team have begun to plan out their revenue targets for 2017. The article advices to ask them specifically what part of that revenue pie you and your hotel marketing team are responsible for. Don’t go a head with a budget without knowing exactly what goals your team is beholden to. Receive clarification as much as possible regarding how many room nights, booked meetings, corporate bookings, etc. will be attributed to your marketing efforts.
Also, don’t ask for the same marketing budget as the current year, as your hotel owners will have a higher expectation for the coming year.
3. Recruit new salespeople to replace poor performers
By this time of the year, there’s no doubt as to which salespeople are your top players and which team members are not achieving their goals. The article advices that if you have already invested in training and sales coaching but you’re still not seeing any gains in the number of groups booked by these poor performers, now’s the time to start looking at other potential sales people to replace them.
4. Gather guest reviews to support your budget requests for hotel upgrades
Despite your consistent and creative marketing efforts, if your hotel is crumbling, ageing and showing signs of decay and disarray, it’s time for an upgrade. There are competitors popping up fresh new properties that modern guests are looking for. So, hotel owners can’t rely on their past investments and expect to drive the same business with the same ol’ product. Upgrades are very much necessary.
Sort through past guest reviews to convince ownership and management that investments are urgent and imperative to effectively compete. Sift through your guest reviews and highlight complaints that come up most often and will most likely drive potential guests away. Some examples are mould in the bathrooms, shades aren’t dark enough, ratty carpets, aged decor, etc.
5. Have an open dialogue with all stakeholders about what’s worked and not worked
For marketing success, have open discussions with other departments of the property team to analyse the year with you and review where you saw your biggest success, where you tanked, what was the best use of marketing funds and where you can save.
The article also advices not to overlook the front desk staff as they are a key source of information about your customers. They often have a insightful direct feedback that could impact your marketing campaigns for the future.