The Marriage of Revenue & Marketing

5 habits to start a collaborative relationship between revenue management and marketing

Before joining #HotelPartner in March 2017, I was responsible for a small portfolio of London hotels. As is the case in many hotels, we had a weekly revenue meeting to review performance, pick up since our last meeting and business on the books for the next few months.?

As a GM, I assembled my Revenue Manager, my Sales Director and my Marketing Manager for this meeting. Sales argued on behalf of their key corporates, revenue wanted to close them out on key dates and marketing would be asking for Christmas menus so that they could go to print (in July!!).??

In this short article, we are going to explore why these seemingly disconnected disciples hold some great opportunities for collaboration and increased performance.

What types of revenue information are valuable to marketing?

I am not a fan of historical data as the future does not always perform as in the past, but understanding consumer behaviour and booking patterns can be very helpful to determine when we should run promotions. If revenue can identify that bookings are slow for particular periods, marketing can bolster their efforts to stimulate demand.?

Digital marketing spend is often allocated per day per month, but knowing that all Saturdays in June/July sell out, perhaps the spend allocated for these peak days should be reallocated to January/February instead. It is important to note that Metaseach can now be used to bid on specific date ranges. Key segmentation data must also be shared so that marketing are able to determine the best channels to push.

The marketing team will regularly be creating audiences whether they are personas, audiences in advertising platforms or segmenting the newsletter database effectively. The segmentation data available in the PMS is an excellent resource to assist the marketing team.?

What types of marketing information are valuable to revenue?

It is just as important that the marketing manager shares their marketing plan with the revenue team so that pricing and restrictions can be coordinated in order to maximise the revenues.?

If marketing knows that there will be a good review published in a national paper this coming weekend, we would expect this to have an impact on the next 3 months of bookings. If the revenue manager is unaware of upcoming spikes in demand, who will manage this uplift? If we are noticing an increased number of US clients perhaps we can steer the menu prices accordingly or if we are pushing the family benefits during school holidays then maybe our larger room types will be in higher demand.?

Why is the relationship important?

It’s the old adage that two shire horses pulling a cart in opposite directions will invariably have less forward motion that if they were pulling in the same direction.?

It is so important that the hard-won corporates are looked after as they often provide year-round business, but if they are not delivering on their negotiated number of rooms, why should we give them rooms during Fashion Week or Farnborough when demand is so strong?

Let’s put our advertising and marketing budgets to good use when we need business, not when we are already full.

Key takeaways

• Sharing source mix with the marketing team to use in audience building
• Sharing campaign engagement with revenue team to anticipate demand
• Reviewing business on the books to influence ad spend and campaign deployment
• Sharing the searched dates and null results on the booking engine with revenue
• Sharing objectives and KPIs between departments so that each can align metrics