It’s Not About the Leads: Unlock Hospitality Marketing That Actually Drives Conversions

Are you playing a numbers game?

The event-driven business hosted at a property is the lifeblood of any marketing program. The amazing work the catering and sales teams put into delivering extraordinarily beautiful events in various styles and price points is a crucial contributor to future booking inquiries.

Interestingly, booking volume is one of the results used to evaluate catering and sales managers. While increasing revenue might seem like a more intuitive result, the percentage of available dates booked is what usually matters most.

It’s no surprise, then, that hospitality marketing has become a numbers game over the years.

Are your qualified leads providing real value?

Inside the hospitality industry, qualified leads are the key investment for marketing. Those leads are driven by dollars spent on digital advertisements, influencer marketing, advertorials, paid event placements, social promotion, and other strategies that make up an overall marketing budget.

Yet views and clicks, which are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of traditional marketing approaches, often only deliver leads that must be nurtured, negotiated, and eventually contracted for an event date with a property. Depending on the property, booking a full year of available dates could require hundreds or even thousands of leads. Yet, all those leads would ultimately boil down to a smaller pool of customers who would actually work with the venue for years to come.

Showcasing “real event” content is, of course, vital for hospitality marketing. Throughout the past decade, our team has found that paying for a guaranteed number of leads via third-party sites is no longer the strategy that contributes meaningfully to faster bookings. What’s more, groups of event vendors collectively sharing a wedding can ladder up to viral moments of brand collaboration. Those moments elevate and differentiate a property’s marketing strategy, motivating qualified customers to reach out with true and clear intentions to book.

Do your prospective customers know what’s possible?

On average, more than 60% of an event’s spend is on the venue. With that in mind, by positioning your property as part of a larger collective of companies working together (as you can see on this Marriott Bonvoy page), your venue doesn’t have to stand alone. The collective power is a benefit that demonstrates how dreams can be brought to life. For customers, seeing a venue in the context of a larger group of vendors can make it shine even brighter, as it removes the guessing game of “Will this be possible?” even after they’ve toured the property.

To that end, a property’s brand page is a digital portfolio of its team members’ work that can be referenced in real-time during a tour. For catering and sales managers, it’s a digital “front door” specific to special events (versus sharing a venue’s homepage, typically crafted towards room booking, experiences, and dining). These pages are where properties and property groups can really tell their brand story as it applies to being a part of a couple’s special day.

How to start driving conversions through ROH and Carats & Cake

When your hospitality group partners with ROH, you unlock several helpful features and benefits. Think: mobile-friendly invoicing and payments that increase revenue, a universal admin dashboard that enhances team collaboration, and comprehensive data and insights that boost profits and performance visibility. And, if any properties in your hospitality group host social events like weddings, you can also unlock exclusive access to the exposure from ROH’s marketing experts at Carats & Cake described above.

When a property taps into Carats & Cake’s 100 million-strong audience, it receives professionally curated promotion across editorial and social channels. The result? A major increase in customer conversions, rather than a bunch of unqualified leads that don’t end up booking an event at your property.

If you’re interested in creating viral moments for your property with custom marketing collateral and real wedding content generated by ROH’s marketing experts at Carats & Cake, sign up for a free demo or learn more here.