How to Prioritize Your Marketing

Unless your company exists in a magical land where money doesn’t matter, you can’t implement every marketing tactic. Yes, someone might tell you to use social media or place ads on Google – but just because it’s a real marketing tactic doesn’t mean it has a fit in your business.

I believe many companies don’t even understand the amount of money wasted on pursuing the wrong (for them) marketing tactics or the amount of unearned revenue due to simply not strategically prioritizing marketing efforts.

I’ve seen marketing decisions made because someone saw something work at another company – sometimes in a different industry, at a different period. Marketing technology is rapidly evolving so the “this worked there, it should work here” motto is one of the worst ways to prioritize your marketing.

If there’s no strategy for your marketing, then you have no way to prioritize what works and what doesn’t. You have no KPIs defined to measure success and make pivots from the learnings. So instead of a well-thought-out marketing strategy to guide the priorities, many people are just doing what they think they should be doing.

• Active on social media. CHECK!
• Ability to mass email. CHECK!
• Website. CHECK!
• Printed branded materials (shirts, brochures, pens). CHECK!

Who’s Handling Marketing?

Many times, marketing is left to someone who has other jobs. I’m looking at you General Managers who are tasked with managing Facebook and Instagram accounts. Activity directors may be the sole photographers. The list goes on. It’s not easy to add marketing tasks to your other job responsibilities.

In reality, marketing is everyone’s job.

Anyone who comes in contact with a customer or potential customer affects marketing. Reviews are marketing gold and they are most heavily influenced by your front desk staff, management, maintenance, housekeeping and activities teams. Not your technical “marketing efforts.” You can set up marketing processes for requesting reviews in a timely manner after check-out with all kinds of features to optimize the success rate. For example there’s programs that prompt the guest to give it a numerical rating and if it’s too low, they are prompted to write an email instead of a public review. If the number rating they select is high, they are prompted to leave a public review.

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Those efforts absolutely help. IF everyone else creates a positive experience.

Create a negative experience and no amount of marketing can help you.

So, everyone’s a marketer.

But at the same time, in many situations, no one’s a marketer.

In many organizations, especially smaller resorts and other small-to-medium businesses, marketing is no one’s job.

General Managers are often tasked with handling or finding someone on the staff to handle social media and online review responses. Staff that handles billing and owner account emailing are often left to handle any non-billing communications too like newsletters, promotional emails, crisis communications in the midst of a hurricane or fire, and sharing positive resort news. Someone is left to manage the online listings, optimize rates and manage everything reservation-related. All of these items should be considered marketing. They all include tasks that can impact the revenue, reputation and retention of a business or resort.

Many small-to-medium resorts and businesses can’t afford to have a marketing person on staff, nor do they have the demanding marketing workload to make that a smart move even if the budget was there.

So how do resorts and businesses prioritize marketing if you’re in a situation where it’s everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time?

The same way you would get anything else prioritized. You plan.

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Just like if you wanted to start prioritizing your health or your finances or making a major renovation come true or the career path you want to pursue.

You make things a priority when you take the planning of them seriously.

To prioritize marketing efforts that have the most impact and are feasible for your organization, resort or business, you have to prioritize making a plan.

Making the Plan

As Simon Sinek details in his best selling book, Start With Why, you need to know why you’re doing something. So begin with defining why you need a marketing plan. What will it help? Increase your reservations? Improve your owner retention? Help boost your sales?

To understand what you have to do, you must first know why you need to do it.

What goals do you believe some marketing efforts could help you reach faster? What problems are you facing?

Now, you’re goals should determine your strategy and what you prioritize.

If your goals could be met with more of something – more sales, more direct rentals then you should focus on strategies that expand your audience. Tactics such as paid ads (which can have big results for small budgets with proper planning) can quickly and easily help expand the number of people interested in purchasing or checking dates for rental reservations. Budgets as low as a few hundred dollars a month and a smart strategy can generate big results.

If your goals are more centered around keeping something – retaining owners, keeping guests coming back more than once, keeping guests informed on resort happenings then your strategies should be centered around communications and ways to engage with those people who are already your audience.

If your goals are around improving something – improving your online reputation, improving the moderness of your brand, improving your website to accept online reservations you likely need a custom solution and some short-term, outside help.

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Increasing your online reputation should absolutely never be promised from a marketing company. Often a bad online reputation has a cause that has been fixed, such as a lengthy construction phase skyrocketing negative reviews or previous bad management that has been replaced. There are strategies for improving those reviews that marketing expertise can help with, such as creating reviewing generating funnels to get more of the currently satisfied guests to leave positive reviews. But if your negative online reputation is being caused by a slew of genuinely poor reviews that accurately represent things that need to be addressed – not marketing or any reputation management company can legitimately help without addressing the issues causing the poor response.

Improving the modernness of your brand can be addressed with something as simple as some guidance to a graphic designer for a logo refresh or extensive project management for replacing signs and printed branded materials. Improving a website may require a website development company to build the website and connect your inventory to an onsite booking engine. Improving your resort photography and videography requires hiring a professional for a shoot.

Once you know your goals, you can focus on prioritizing the efforts that can impact the goals that are most important to you.

You can have goals in all three categories – you just have to prioritize which ones come first so if time, money or manpower constraints exist (which again, should be there unless you’re in magic land of unlimited time and money) you know where to strategically put your resources that are the most impactful to the things that matter most.

Once you know your goal and strategy priorities, plan out what efforts fall under each one, including both current efforts that may affect your goals (such as your current email communications to incoming, in-house and checked-out guests or current social media platforms and posting schedule – or lack thereof) and efforts you believe you want to start.

Then, start breaking down how to bring those to life. It may involve seeking help – either from a consultant or hiring a web development company, a branding agency or signing up for a design service to easily outsource your graphic design needs. You may find there’s current efforts you can or should cut. Or there may be things you think you should do because someone mentioned them, but ultimately they aren’t efforts that would have as much impact towards your goals than other efforts.

Ensure your staff who will be involved understand that everyone’s job is marketing even though it may be no ones. Compensate your people for helping out – bonuses when names are mentioned in reviews, raise or project bonuses for taking on tasks that benefit marketing such as putting together newsletters or communications. If you expect marketing to be everyone’s job, there should be planned and budgeted ways to compensate for that.

Kelley Ellert is a marketing consultant and strategist who helps resorts of all sizes implement custom marketing strategies. Look her up on LinkedIn @kelley-ellert.