At the HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference on June 17, Stephanie Smith of Cogwheel tried to change mindsets about how backwards most hotel marketing budgets are created.

There are 3 ways to create a hotel marketing budget:

1 – Too Little – Take last year’s budget and add 10% 

2 – Too Much – Take your top line forecast then budget 3-8% towards marketing

3 – Just Right – Follow the following steps to property justify a targeting hotel marketing budget

Steps to Creating a Hotel Marketing Budget

Without following this framework as a hotel commercial team, you will never be able to solve issues or reach team goals. Otherwise, we are left trying to stretch dollars across various tactics too thin.

1 – Define Gaps and Goals

2 – Determine a Strategy (as a team)

3 – Solve with Specific Tactics

4 – Allocate funds and budgets

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:

Lastly, a chart of digital marketing KPIs, not just ROAS and cheat sheet to align the customer journey funnel and their aligned tactics, KPIs and costs.