Increase your Hotel Meeting Room Bookings with a smarter marketing approach

The facilitating and renting out of hotel meeting space for company employee inductions, offsites, training programmes, culture events, remote working catchups and other corporate needs can add a significant revenue boost for hotel and hospitality venues. MICE sales teams can maximise their hotel meeting room bookings to deliver more and repeat business through the deployment of smarter marketing strategies.

Ensure your target audience can easily find your venue online.

Is your hotel visible on the first page of search engine results, ahead of your closest competitors? Are you using the most impactful keywords across your site content meta descriptions? Your SEO strategy, content marketing and social media communications should all be working hard to grow your brand awareness and attract the right traffic to your site.

A high profile search listing not only boosts website traffic, it asserts the authority and attractiveness of your business offer, gives new prospects confidence to click through to your site and raises your brand awareness by helping you be seen by a wider customer base.  Paid Google Ads (Pay Per Click ) can ensure a top page ranking for customers using search terms such as ‘hotel meeting rooms’.

Paid Ads for local marketing, using optimised and highly targeted keywords will raise your venue’s ranking over the local competition and ensure you’re reaching a defined audience of the most potential and valuable customers. That in return, will deliver efficient click-through rates and ROI.

Your content marketing plan forms a key element to maximise your hotel meeting room bookings. It should include themed blogs and social posts which are thoughtfully targeted to engage with your ideal client. They should clearly demonstrate you understand their business needs and lay out a range of solutions as to how your venue can help with the challenges they face. This builds trust and emphasises your credibility, experience and expertise over the competition. It’s how a new prospect can convert into a repeat customer and even become an advocate for your venue.

Are you promoting your company and individual presence on LinkedIn, connecting and constantly engaging with prospective companies, showcasing your venue’s capabilities to meeting planners and events professionals and maintaining a warm rapport with past and current customers?

Demonstrate how your meeting room facilities, location and hotel environment can deliver valuable team productivity and relationship-building and allow delegates to relax, rest and socialise (sports, leisure and spa facilities, dining, guest rooms etc). Promote with great video and photography posts on Instagram and Facebook. 

Is your social media calendar strategy delivering clear engagement with your target audience.  Are you sharing customer testimonials both as social proof, and online? User-generated content such as TripAdvisor reviews can be added to your website with the aid of a widget. Equally, local Google and Facebook reviews are key to attracting prospective customer enquiries, so focus solid care and attention on your reputation marketing.

Showcase your meeting room space and facilities at the hotel on your website and social channels by producing striking creative and content assets such as superb photography, video, well designed promotional materials and shareable information downloads.

Capturing enquiry contact details through a CRM system enables you to build a valuable database of past and prospective clients, providing the ideal opportunity to direct mail themed E-shots that promote for example, your market-leading technology facilities, special seasonal and discounted deals or range of innovative, creative meeting space that could be perfect for that Millennial corporate customer. Ensure you respond to every meeting room and event enquiry within a maximum of 24 hours.  

Your database is a golden opportunity collect valuable insights from and about your clients. Incentivise customers to comment on their venue experience, reward recommendation and understand what they are looking for from MICE venues generally. A ‘conversation marketing’ approach is far more effective than broadcast marketing, so listen to your customers, respond and maintain a dialogue, using all feedback to personalise your future offer.

Most hotels ensure highly visible signage and marketing materials to promote their weddings offer; does your hotel actively highlight its meeting room facilities as effectively? Think of all the locations that could highlight your corporate meeting room and event offer; from in-room information to signage in the car park, dining areas, front gate, leisure and nearby outdoor space. Add impactful photography to your lobby and bathrooms to ensure every guest and visitor is aware of your meeting room capacities and that a tour is always available.

If you’re looking to review or develop your hotel marketing strategy, do get in touch with us.

At ZOO, we pride ourselves on our 20-year hotel marketing agency experience ranging from independent boutique hotels to larger, global chains. We retain the same passion for every new hospitality brief, harnessing the power of our digital marketing expertise, branding strategy and creative storytelling to deliver more traffic and enquiries, grow brand awareness and most of all, keep a relentless focus on ROI.

To find out how we could help increase your hotel meeting room bookings and MICE sales, do get in touch.  We tailor our approach to the individual needs of each client and focus on building long-term relationships, understanding your objectives and target customers before implementing the right strategies that get results.