6 Ways Hotel Marketing Can Generate More Leads for Group Sales
6 Ways Hotel Marketing Can Generate More Leads for Group Sales
July 19, 2018
Is your hotel marketing team actively helping your sales team?
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| Are you maximizing your hotels' revenue potential? |
Ways that the Marketing Department can help.
There are many ways for hotel marketers to generate group business leads for their hotel and sales teams efforts. By taking the marketing your team already knows and uses for your specific hotel, they can do minor critiquing to adjust to group sales leads. Your Marketing team should be a force for marketing every aspect of the hotel, especially group sales.
mar·ket·ing ˈmärkədiNG/
noun: The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
Marketers are adept at market research, customer analysis, creating campaigns for target markets and converting advertisements into leads. Why would they not be a major part of group sales?1. Set a Quota
While this may be an abstract concept among hotel marketers, other industries have had great success assigning lead generation quotas to marketing teams for years. General Managers and Property Owners are tired of hearing “branding initiatives” or logo designs and graphic art… they are right to expect their hotels' marketing team to contribute to revenue in a major way, and be accountable for the physical leads they do and do not produce.Quotas for marketing teams can be set in terms of leads and verified closed deals generated by leads driven by the marketing team. Marketers in this role often receive bonuses based on their department's performance against their quota.
Hotel marketers that are not used to quota expectations may only see this as a burden, but it is also an opportunity: If they meet their assigned lead generation targets, they increase their value in an important way to their company and can ask for compensation increases or department funds as a result.
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| Communication is Key. |
2. Constant Communication with “HVTs”
Every hotel should have their Top 100 list of “high-value targets.” The hotels marketing team should ensure HVTs are entered into a CRM platform so they can send out a steady stream of engaging current area events, special occasions, upcoming hotel and local attractions and hotel information that will help meeting planners do their jobs when planning a meeting in your destination area. Meeting planners book venues they trust and feel they know. One way to build trust is by communicating consistently in a selfless and advisory way. Hotel marketers should deploy a steady source of stories, photos, and content that helps future and current prospects understand the destination better and do their job more effectively with up to date and relevant information.Under no circumstances should the content be self-serving or self-promoting!
Content “streams” do not have to be restricted to email or digital content alone. Direct mailing of personal notes and helpful material often breaks through the monotony and differentiates you from the thousands of other spam emails your prospects receive each week. Creating this rhythm of content will establish your property as a trusted resource, and position you as the premier hotel in your destination area.
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| How many leads does your marketing department provide to group sales? |
3. Empower Sales with Marketing Automation
You have already been using marketing automation to increase leisure business for years, in the form of post-stay surveys, to reservation recovery emails. You can use the same principle to be a catalyst for increasing meetings and group events at your hotel. By inserting a code (provided from your marketing automation vendor or hotel marketing agency) into your website, you can monitor whenever one of your sales team’s key group business targets visits your meeting pages. (Having a specific page on your hotel's website designed for groups and planners is a major asset in group sales)3. Empower Sales with Marketing Automation
Your marketing automation software is able to determine the planner’s interests by following their clicks. This helps to see if the planner spends more time looking at catering menus, a section on government meetings and per diem pricing, or if they watched a virtual tour of your largest convention space. You can then provide data to the sales team to enable them to create relevant messages and offers to match the planners’ exact event needs. This helps with negotiations and closings, by already knowing the planners' interests, and not having to gauge the needs of the group and ask more questions than needed.
4. Stay Mindful with Retargeting
Your hotel should always be mindful of meeting planners who visit, then leave your hotel website’s meeting page. If a meeting planner visits your website and leaves without submitting an RFP, set up a retargeting display ad campaign to follow them online, and remind them what makes your venue the best option for their group.
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| In a digital age, content is everything. |
5. Create Compelling Destination Content
Establishing your hotel and its sales team as the meeting industry leaders in your city by creating helpful, infotainment content is essential. This will display high value for your hotel as being the most experienced hotel to host meetings and events in your area. Use your already made leisure content and reword it to market to group sales and planners'.Pay to publish these into the LinkedIn and Facebook newsfeeds of meeting professionals. Post these onto your hotel’s own meetings and events blog or repurpose this as content for upcoming sales newsletters (See #2 & 3 above). Alternatively, hiring a professional service to handle digital marketing campaigns can ensure that the right keywords are used, SEO is in order and content-rich ads are maximizing your marketing efforts. You can also hire a Marketing Consulting Agency to do a one time audit of your marketing department and establish a system specifically designed for your hotel.
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| Are you optimized for meeting planners? |
6. Optimize Your Hotels Website for Meeting Planners
Your website is your main marketing tool, so don’t solely target leisure guests. Be sure your meetings and events section has all the resources that meeting planners need to make their decision and do their job. Planners want relevant sourcing tools that they can download directly from hotel websites. They should have access to downloading photos of past events, floor diagrams, room measurements, capacity charts, testimonials, and 360-degree venue tours. This not only helps your hotel by giving them all the materials to make the best decision, but it helps them to perform their job effectively which saves them valuable time. Your downloadable content should be professional, clean and capture the theme of your hotel. Use this content to showcase your hotel at it's highest quality.6. Optimize Your Hotels Website for Meeting Planners
A group sales lead generating partnership between your sales and marketing team is a formula for great success and higher group sales revenue. Many of the resources needed are already in place, and with a little rewording and retargeting of already created content, much time is saved. To maximize more on your group sales marketing success, Marketing Consultants and Marketing Specialists are available for a one-time consultation or as a continued marketing agency to handle your campaigns and online marketing.
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