Hotel Marketing Budgets Must Include Online and Offline Marketing

Hotel marketing budgets comprise a distinct type of marketing budgeting. I’ve written on marketing budgets in general before. You can read summaries of these articles with links to them by clicking the link below:

Marketing Budgets Monthly Roundup

But hotel marketing budgets deserve special attention. In fact, most industries require some unique categories in their marketing budgets.

I’ve written a couple of articles on hotel marketing before. You can access them below:

Hotel Market Segmentation & Hotel Customer Segments

Hotel Survey Results Reveals Best Target Market

These posts bring some traffic so I’ve planned for some time to write on hotel marketing budgets. But not being an expert on the hotel industry, I decided to do some online research for “hotel marketing budgets” search results first.

What surprised me most by the articles, on the first page of Google’s results, is the emphasis on online marketing. Of the page one results, all dealt with online marketing, and a couple dealt solely with online marketing.

None provided what I’d hope to find – a blank budget with percentages for each category.  But one did provide categories with percentages  for online marketing. BEYOND THE MARKETING BUDGET FOR 2008 notes that “25 to 30% of the marketing budget should go toward Internet marketing services …”

It divides the percentages of the Internet part of a hotel marketing budget into the following subcategories:

• website design and marketing (25%),

• organic search optimization (16%),

• paid search marketing (15%),

• link development (12%),

• email marketing (12%)

• social media and web2.0 (7%),

• banner ads and listings on complimentary websites (6%),

• meta search (3.5%)

• local search (3.5%).

Another article listed somewhat different categories for the Internet part of a hotel marketing budget, but provided no percentages. A Practical Guide to Hotel Marketing Budget Planning included

• Website optimization

• Search visibility improvement

• Pay-per-click advertising.

• Online reputation management

• E-mail communications

• Content development

• Media production

• Press relations & media outreach

It mentions only three major categories that are not Internet related – staffing, training, and consulting.

This emphasis on the Internet part of a hotel marketing budget isn’t surprising consideriing that Building your hotel’s 2008 online marketing budget reports   “In 2008, 60% of all travel bookings and up to 40% of all hotel bookings in North America will be generated from the Internet ….”  He predicts that “By 2010 the Internet will contribute over 45% of all hotel bookings in North America.”

But if I were doing marketing for a hotel, I’d spend at least half of my hotel marketing budget off line. It makes sense to me that if 45 percent of sales come from online, 65 percent come from off line sources. So off line should still get the largest chunk of a hotel marketing budget. That leaves from 25 to 20 percent for staffing, training, and consulting.

How Consumers Pick a Hotel: Strategic Segmentation and Target Marketing

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Posted 10-30-09:
Hotel Marketing Budgets
Must Include Online and Offline Marketing

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 6:33 am and is filed under Marketing Budgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.