All the departments, from the front office to the kitchen, are on their toes. Afterall, these hotel events are a source of revenue for every department. 

During the peak season, many properties host events at a great frequency, and often they have banquets sold out. But what about the off-season? 

I know, that’s a tough time for any hotel business. So, today we will discuss all the possible ways to increase events at hotels.

How to increase events at hotels?

Increasing hotel events is no rocket science. Implementing the correct steps at the right time will help you achieve this.

Here are nine easy ways to increase events at your hotel.

1. Promote your space

Well, no one will know that you have a space to host events, until and unless you let them know. Promoting your venues is one of the important steps that can increase events at your hotel.

So, how to do it? 

Simple! Approach the right audience. Now, that depends upon the type of events your property can host. 

For instance, if your hotel has lawns, then the target audience would be guests looking for wedding venues. In case you have conference halls, you can approach corporates for business meetings.

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A post shared by Seasons Banquets (@seasons_banquets)

I know, this may seem like a basic step. But trust me, once you start promoting your space to the right audience, you will be hosting events frequently.

2. Connect with travel agents

Travel agents are a vital part of the hospitality industry. They are one of the sources that connect hotels and guests. 

Many event planners take help from travel agents for making their tour arrangements. Most of them look for accommodation facilities for a large group of guests.

You can approach these travel agents with your hotel’s portfolio. Ensure that you highlight all the facilities available for hosting an event.

Be it capacity, seating arrangement, technology, amenities, or more. Have a tie-up with travel agents on a profit-sharing or commission basis. 

This would initially boost your room sales and eventually increase events at your hotel.

3. Partner with event planners

It is a kind of direct marketing to the guests. Event planners are one of the key players in the hospitality industry.

Not all of them manage high-end events. Some prefer parties and functions with a small headcount. The best part of small events is that they are easily manageable and end quickly.

So, you can host two events in a single day. In order to increase events at hotels, it’s necessary to partner with small and big event planners alike.

Partner with event planners from a different niche. Don’t miss any of them. This is one of the most effective ways to increase events at hotels.

4. Be available on event planning platforms

Recently, I was surfing on the internet, and I came across a website – weddingz.in

Out of curiosity, I checked the website for more details. The working concept of the firm is simple and quite intriguing.

The website listed all the available spaces in the city to host a wedding. Guests landing on the website can shortlist the venues they like and schedule a visit. 

A person from the organisation guides them through their selected locations and books one which guests zero in on.

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A post shared by Weddingz.in (@weddingz.in)

Many websites work on such a simple yet effective module these days. 

You need to list your hotel on such platforms, highlight your venues, facilities, and offerings. These event planning platforms can assist you in targeting guests and increasing events at your hotel.

5. Don’t forget the corporates

Be it boosting room sales or increasing hotel events, working with corporates is the best approach. (I learned about this during my training days.)

Our hotel had many corporate clients. Some of them were regular visitors.

The frequency at which they hosted business conferences was unbelievable. Every month they had a seminar or a product training session which lasted for 5-6 days.

But naturally, the hotel’s banquet halls were busy for the entire day in those days. In fact, our hotel’s 50% guests were the ones attending the conference.

That’s when I realised how beneficial it was to have corporate tie-ups. I would strongly recommend you to connect with organisations. 

Once you have them as your customers, you tend to have an opportunity to host maximum formal events at your hotel.

6. Host your own events

Who said that you can’t host events if you don’t have anything in your bucket? Why wait for an opportunity when you can host an event of your own?

It’s the easiest way to be in the limelight. All you need to do is, organise and promote an event at the hotel. 

The event can be about the hotel’s opening anniversary, new year bash or any other workshops. You can market it across various channels and your loyal guests.

Promoting a self-hosted event garners the attention of event planners and the guests. Eventually, leading to an increase in events at your hotel.

7. Influence through social media

Social media is a perfect tool to promote events of your hotel. Millennials and GenZ share their life stories on social media.

The best part is, they geotag the location of any event they visit. It gives the properties a free promotion on the internet.

Moreover, with the use of relevant hashtags, these posts reach a wider audience. Make sure you have an online presence.

Whenever you host an event, don’t forget to post about it on social media platforms. It will keep your guests updated about events and functions happening at your property.

Further, don’t forget to promote events on Facebook, because many guests attending any event look for it on Facebook.

Facebook events have paved the way for hotels and planners to market their events across the globe. This tip works like a magic wand in increasing events at your hotel.

8. Focus on delivering the experience

In my previous blogs, I have always emphasised on delivering a better guest experience. Be it in terms of stay, food or events. 

According to an article published by Harvard Business Review,

“Guests having the best experience in the past, tend to spend 140% more than the guests who had poor experience.”

Events involve providing a great experience to two different sets of guests:

1. The organiser, or the event planner
2. Event attendees

In any case, you have to ensure a flawless operation and management of the event. I know you might be wondering – What can hotels do for it?

It’s simple, check for all the arrangements before the event starts. Focus on these five aspects – Ambience, food, hygiene, service, and technology.

The key to hosting a successful event is delivering a great experience with flawless operation and management.

Pro-tip: After the pandemic, guests avoid attending any events. You can highlight safety measures deployed at your hotel. Also, you can use pictures to showcase the safety precautions you took to host a successful event.

9. Don’t host stereotypical events

Do you know why dinosaurs went extinct? Because they could not adapt to the changing environment.

And I’m sure, you don’t want the industry to suffer a loss, because they couldn’t keep up with changing trends. 

For instance, your property organises small events and parties for a long time. One fine day, you receive a query for hosting an event for 100 pax.

You have the space available for the required date. But, you have to deny it because you don’t have enough experience of organising large events. 

I would recommend you to organise and host various types of events that are possible at your hotel. It will help in increasing your hotel’s business exponentially.

FAQs

The post These 9 Strategies Can Help You Boost Events at Your Hotel appeared first on eZee Absolute.

Talking about Facebook, it still remains one of the key players in the social media market. Initially, it was just a source of making new friends. But over time, it became a revenue-generating platform.

For hotels, it has become necessary to be active on Facebook. It benefits them in various ways by promoting hotel events, generating bookings, highlighting their pages with ads and others. 

Today, let me tell you about one of these features in detail: Promote hotel events on Facebook.

Why should you promote hotel events on Facebook?

Before the dawn of the internet era, hotels promoted their events using hoardings, banners, newspaper ads, and other offline methods. But, these are the things of the past.

Nowadays, these events have found their place on social media platforms. In fact, Facebook’s exclusive feature pertaining to events has got every hotel’s attention. 

So, what makes Facebook events beneficial for hotels? Let’s find out about them.

a. Better reach

As per the demographics provided by statista.com:

Facebook has more than 2.7 billion monthly active users.

That’s definitely a terrific amount of users. If you can penetrate even  0.1% of them, you would have ample data to work. 

By posting about events happening at your hotel on Facebook, you start reaching out to the majority of the audience.

With proper optimisation of ads and engaging content, you can connect with thousands of people in a single go.

b. Target custom audience

The best part of Facebook is targeted ads. With multiple filters such as age, location, gender and others, it becomes easy to set your audience type.

To make it more specific, Facebook introduced a website extension – ‘Facebook pixels’.

It provides data of members who take action on your events you have advertised, such as registering for the events or mark them as visiting.

It assists hotels in promoting events among guests who are actually interested in visiting them.

c. Lower costs

The best part of promoting with ads on Facebook is – no minimum budget. 

You can promote hotel events on facebook without investing a heavy amount of money.

Moreover, running ads is optional. If you have a good amount of traffic on your hotel’s Facebook page, just posting and promoting events on the timeline is more than enough.

Talking about the cost of Facebook ads, it starts from just $1. I don’t think that should burn a hole in your pocket. You can set your budget depending upon the target audience you want to reach out to.

How to promote hotel events on Facebook?

You may think that I would be boring you with cliche and conventional ideas to promote event on Facebook. But no, I won’t. 

Instead, I’ve got some easy tweaks, which would do wonders for your property. Let’s understand how to promote hotel events on Facebook.

a. Act early

When I was a student, I always used to study just one night before my exams. You won’t believe it, but I scored pretty good grades.

However, when you promote an event on Facebook, I won’t recommend doing that. It’s better to plan and start it at least a month before the event. 

There are two merits of listing your event a month prior:

1. You get enough time to mark an impression on your audience. 
2. You can promote events regularly. 

Once you start early, you can keep on revising your target audience from time to time to create a better impact.

b. Presentation is important 

See, a poorly presented ad can never catch guests’ attention. Assume that, I have shared a link to an upcoming event in the town. The moment you open it, a messed up ad appears up. 

A shabbily written content (not easy to understand), zero images, missing highlights of the events, and such likes, is sure to hold you back from booking it.

While creating any event, you need to focus on two vital aspects:

1. An enthralling title – 

A captivating headline is a MUST to grab guests’ attention. For instance, if there’s a celebrity night in your hotel, you can’t have a headline stating – Celebrity night in our hotel.

It won’t help you achieve the required impact. But, what if the headline would be – Enjoy the starry night with Bollywood celebs under one roof.

Sounds alluring, right? 

Similarly, try creating some catchy and mind-boggling titles for your events.

2. High-quality content –

I have told this in my previous blogs, but let me rephrase it again – Content is the emperor. 

Be it blogs, brand websites, ads or events, none of them is complete without good quality content. It should be easy to understand and compel guests to register for the event.

Pro-tip: Read the content written for an event at your hotel. If it compels you to visit the event, go ahead with it. But if it's not achieving the purpose, redo the entire thing again from scratch.

c. Use pictures and videos 

The basic fundamental rule of promoting any event is using pictures and videos related to it. Let your audience get an insight into how it would look.

Remember – Seeing is believing.

Let’s say I tell you about a happening party I had been to yesterday.  After listening about it, you feel like attending one. Obviously, you would like to see the photos and videos of the party.

But, what if I don’t have them. You might think it’s just a bluff and walk it off. Instead, if I showed you pictures, it would give a weightage to whatever I said.

So, it is another mandatory aspect you should check while promoting any events. Also, using high-quality photos and videos will be more impactful.

d. Don’t forget the location

Naturally, you’d be hosting events at your premises. But don’t forget to geotag your location during those events.

The reason behind this is simple – Location-based recommendations.

Facebook recommends events going on in the nearby vicinity of any user. Moreover, it is also visible to the friends of the users who signed up for attending it. 

This chain would automatically promote the event as well as your property.

e. Market it on various pages

It’s good, if you promote hotel events on your property’s Facebook page. But, that’s not enough. 

You should maximise your reach by doing it over other timelines also. It could be the Facebook pages of your city or social clubs operating in your area.

Once you start approaching these pages, it would widen your reach amongst the audience. Eventually, providing you with an opportunity to gain maximum bookings for the events you host.

f. Tag sponsoring brands 

During any sports match, have you noticed the jerseys of players having sponsors logos on them? It helps in two ways:

1. The organisers receive financial aid to make all necessary arrangements.
2. Sponsors gain visibility and brand recognition.

Even in events hosted by your hotel, there might be certain sponsors. You can tag them in your posts.

The audience following them can see the upcoming event organised by those brands. You can say it’s an indirect way to promote hotel events on Facebook.

g. Hashtags are MUST

Have you ever come across Facebook posts with hashtags in them? Users follow these hashtags to see content relevant to them. 

For example, I follow various hashtags about nature and photography. So, when I click on them, I see posts that have these hashtags mentioned in them. 

Similarly, while posting about any event in your hotel, use them as much as you can. I’m not saying to bombard it with hundreds of them. But, use at least 5-7 hashtags in the post.

Pro-tip: You can alternatively copy and paste these hashtags for having a better reach. 

#events #hotelevents #hotel #party #conference #liquor #partynight #l4l #follow #yolo #weekend #cityscape #nightlife #lifestyle #funtime #shoutout #business #banquets #feast 

h. Run Facebook ads for promotion

Well, you might be aware of Facebook ads. It’s one of the most sought features by social media marketers. 

The best part is that it is entirely customisable as per users’ needs. All you need to do is, create an ad based on the results you expect.

Ensure that you set the correct goal since it will give a suitable CTA to the ad viewers. Also, don’t forget to define your target audience. You can use filters to be specific about it. 

As I mentioned above, Facebook ads are not too costly. You can set the budget as per your convenience. Moreover, choose the timeframe for running the ad. 

Using Facebook ads is optional. You can skip this option if you don’t want to make any financial investments. But, on second thought, I would recommend opting for Facebook ads at least one time.

The post 8 Insanely Easy Ways to Promote Hotel Events on Facebook appeared first on eZee Absolute.