From keeping things runnings smoothly in your hotel to building up an online presence, there are a lot of moving parts that contribute to your property’s success. Do you know which strategies are making the most impact? If you haven’t audited your marketing efforts or if you don’t have a defined marketing plan, then it’s time to track and improve the ROI of your marketing efforts.

From planning to execution, maintaining a successful hotel marketing plan will be an ongoing process. Here are the essential steps to create a hotel marketing plan:

1. Complete an analysis
2. Set your objectives
3. Choose your strategies
4. Implement the plan
5. Evaluate the financial impact

If you’re just starting out, changing brands, or planning on building a new property, check out our white paper: The Essential Hotel Launch Marketing Plan. From a year before opening to your first check-ins, this guide will take you through each step of building your online presence.

1. Complete an Analysis

Before you can compete in the marketplace, you need to know where you stand. You can do this by creating a competitive matrix to help you see where you stand in comparison to your competition. Along the top, list your hotel and your closest competitors. Then, on the side list key information such as the number of rooms, average room rate, overall strengths, weaknesses, and ranking information such as Google Hotels ranking, TripAdvisor Ranking, and your total social following.

You can also contact us to set up a free analysis of your hotel, including your social media and review status, presence on listing websites and directories, search engine indexing, NAP errors, and more.

2. Set Your Objectives

Based on your analysis, where can you improve? Do you need a more engaged social presence – or do you not have one at all? Are your online reviews hurting the chances of gaining new guests? Is your competitor doing a better job of advertising? Your objectives can be small tasks or overall business goals. Here are some sample objectives you may want to set:

• Increase occupancy rate by 5%
• Raise TripAdvisor city rank by 7 spots
• Get 10% more direct bookings and pay less in OTA fees

3. Choose Your Strategies

This is how you will achieve your objectives. Choose which objectives you want to improve on and decide how you will track the progress and the projected impact. Strategies can include making updates to your hotel, implementing a reputation management program, branching out to create an independent website, or creating a plan to consistently post on social media.

4. Implement the Plan

Now that you know what you want to do, how will you do it? Follow through at this point is the most important part to ensuring success with your new marketing plan. To start, identify the following:

• Who will be in charge of each change?
• What will be the cost?
• How often will you measure the progress of your objectives?
• When are your deadlines for each task?

When it comes to making changes to your hotel marketing plan, you can’t just make a change and forget about it. Most marketing projects require continuous maintenance and tweaking to get the most out of each strategy.

5. Evaluate the Financial Impact

On a monthly or quarterly basis, check in on each strategy to determine if they are achieving your organization’s goals. If something is not working, you now have a way to pinpoint what it is that needs to be changed.

It may seem like a lot of work if you’ve never made a hotel marketing plan before. However, you can’t afford to not plan ahead. You’re fighting high OTA booking fees, market share loss to shared lodging like Airbnb, and a customer base that has the tools to be extremely discerning in their choices. It’s more important now than ever before to be able to stand on your own in the digital space.

Receive a complete assessment of your hotel online with a Digital Marketing Specialist!