Staying at the forefront of digital marketing changes requires harnessing state-of-the-art...
The dust has settled, and most hoteliers are staring at newly minted 2024 budgets. Those budgets likely feature big revenue goals with marginal increases in marketing dollars (if you're lucky). Property owners tend to require herculean feats of performance - meaningful growth in RevPar while starving any marketing channel that could help achieve the goal.
What's a smart hotelier to do?
Hack the budget - find ways to drive direct revenue without touching the "marketing expense" line. Win/Win
Budget Allocation
In your 2024 media budget, you've likely allocated money to channels like Paid Search, Display, and Paid Social, which you hope will generate returns of 8-1 or better. With outstanding management, you may be able to improve performance and efficiency, but not enough to make a dent in your new revenue goals.
But what have you allocated to Metasearch marketing?
If you're like most hotels, it's a fraction of the amount you are spending on the other channels. That is despite the fact that OTA's and others are spending almost twice as much on Metasearch as they are on Google Paid Search. TWICE.
We can assume that these multi-billion dollar companies with bottomless advertising budgets know what they're doing. They know that dollars spent on Metasearch generate consistently high returns. Individual hotels with limited budgets should learn from them and put more weight on marketing on metasearch channels.
Let's break it down.
To extrapolate in simplistic terms - if you were to take all of the money you have allocated this year to Paid Search, Display Advertising, and Social Advertising and multiply the amount by 1.8, that would give you a baseline for the amount you should spend on Metasearch.
Yes, it's too late to ask for more budget, and such a proposal would be dead on arrival for most owners. Time to break out the hack.
Increased Direct Revenue Without Increased Marketing Cost
With Metadesk, hotels can work on a performance-based model whereby Metadesk pays for all media expenses in exchange for a commission on revenue. Put another way, you can generate precious direct revenue without spending a nickel from your marketing budget. And unlike OTA's, you aren't paying a commission to find customers through a third party - these become your customers, in your database, that you can market to forever more. The commission paid to Metadesk is small and coded to the same line as travel agents.
When was the last time your owner said you were spending too much money on travel agent commissions?
Outcome
Simply put, the result is a big boost in direct revenue without an increase in marketing expenses.
How much of a revenue boost?
For some back-of-the-napkin math, let's go back to your total digital media budget. For the sake of argument, multiply your annual media budget by 1.5. That is the approximate amount Metadesk will spend marketing your property on your behalf. Now assume the platform can generate a 10 - 1 return on ad spend, so multiply the total projected marketing spend by 10..
Chances are, that's a LOT of incremental direct revenue. Possible enough to exceed your 2024 revenue budget and cement you as a hero in the eyes of your peers and owners. Enough to impress even a Greek god of strength.
Why Metadesk?
Metadesk was built by GCommerce, the prestige marketing agency in the hospitality industry. The platform offers improved metasearch performance through strategic targeting and professional campaign optimization. The advantages of Metadesk are numerous:
- Managed by media experts
- Continual campaign optimization
- Easy collaboration
- Custom 1st party audiences
- Real-time parity monitoring
- On-demand access to reports
- Fair pricing model
Most importantly, this program was built by hoteliers with a long legacy of performance. As the above "hack" demonstrates, Metadesk was built to take advantage of hospitality industry nuances and supercharge the performance of a property.
