‘Hope’ is a lousy business strategy when it comes to running a hotel business. Yet many hotel businesses choose to run their marketing campaigns almost entirely on hope. They spend money on adverts, whether online or offline, and then they cross their fingers and hope. They hope that potential guests are going to find their ads and book with them. They feel they have no other option but to sit back and hope for the best.

It is hardly surprising that stress levels are high amongst hotel owners. So have you ever asked yourself if there is a better way? How would you feel if you knew you could transform the marketing of your hotel from a game of chance, which translates to insecurity, anxiety and sleepless nights, to an organised, reliable marketing system, based on ‘Return on Investment’?

In other words, you put money into your hotel marketing strategies knowing, in advance, that you are going to get more money back? What difference would it make to your hotel business and your life if this was true for you? How good would it feel if that lousy word ‘hope’ was removed from your thinking and your vocabulary forever? As a hotel marketing and sales expert, I would NEVER run my business on hope. And you don’t have to either. To ensure that your hotel marketing is successful, you must have a hotel marketing plan.

Although it is tempting to leave your marketing up to chance when you are so busy with the day-to-day running of your hotel, you cannot afford to do this. The marketing of your hotel is your most important job of all. After all, without guests, you do not have a hotel business. A hotel marketing plan means that you can stop leaving the success of your business to chance and start making the profits that you deserve.

The secret, when building your hotel marketing plan, is to test out a number of marketing strategies on a small scale, and work out which ones generate the greatest response rates and profits. Only when you have done your measuring and testing do you roll out your chosen strategies on a large scale. Just imagine the difference it could make to your hotel if you applied just one or two proven money-making strategies, let alone more.

Make it your goal to test at least one new marketing strategy a month. Within a year you might have found several that produced reasonable results and one or two that aren’t worth pursuing. However, you will likely have found five or six, at least, that prove real winners, that you can then implement on a much larger scale, knowing that you will get the results you want. The secret is to always fully test and measure every strategy that you use. You cannot make good decisions without complete knowledge.

Say goodbye to ‘hope’ forever. Say hello to ‘certainty, security and happiness’ with a hotel marketing plan that works for you.