As a revenue manager, you probably ask yourself a variety of questions ranging from how to secure profit increases for your business to finding ways to provide the right price to the right customer at the right time. It might be comforting for you to know that you have an internal ally in this endless battle of driving demand: your marketing department.
Marketing is constantly looking for answers to a similar volley of questions, making them an excellent candidate for internal collaboration on achieving mutual goals. In fact, revenue managers have a lot of vital information that they can share with their marketing department to help them both drive revenue increases and gain market share.
Check out five types of information that your marketing department wants from you:
Accurate Demand Forecasts
Demand forecasts are a powerful tool for marketers. Since demand forecasts are validated at the property (or sometimes regional) level and specifically account for revenue, they trump any other internal forecast in terms of accuracy. Marketing can use demand forecasts to know if and when their property needs to saturate the market to fill low demand or shoulder periods.
Booking Pace
Booking pace measures how many bookings you have on the books at any given time for a future date, or set of dates. Your hotel’s booking pace varies throughout the year and can be affected by many different factors. If your marketing department understands your property’s booking patterns, they can refine and tailor campaigns around driving demands over your need periods.
Profitable Pricing of Rooms & Packages
As a revenue manager, you understand your pricing better than anyone else at your property. You’re using software and data-driven tactics to establish the right price points that optimize revenue according to your demand and market conditions. Your marketing department is concurrently creating incentivized offers and promotions to help drive demand. Giving them insight into the right pricing information is important for them in helping you generate revenue.
Competitive Set Information
It’s no secret that your competitors influence how you negotiate and set your rates on a weekly (or if we’re being honest here, sometimes daily) basis. Marketing also watches your competitors but their information seriously lags in comparison to your constant watch and insight. By internally sharing your comp set information, marketing can become more proactive with their campaigns – making last minute adjustments to strengthen market competitiveness.
Access to Transaction-Level Data
You’re running transactional data reports every single day. This transactional data is the specific information that connects campaign offers with its revenue. Working with marketing allows you to see which specific marketing campaigns make money and how much money they bring to the hotel. Think about it: You can help marketing change the conversation from acceptance or commit rates to cost and revenue generation metrics. This is the kind of information needed to not only justify marketing budgets, but to give insight and clarity into campaigns that are successful and campaigns that fail to hit the mark.
Are you reading this and wondering, “This is nice, but how does this end up helping me? What is marketing going to give me back so I can achieve my goals?” Hey, don’t worry – your marketing department has some really insightful information that they can share with you, too.
Check back for our follow-up post, “Give It (Back) to Me: What You Want From Marketing.”