Marketing Your Hotel’s Live Entertainment Program
The marketing strategy around your live music, DJ, and resort activation program depends on various factors including your type of hotel, guest experience goals, revenue goals, and more. In this article we break down these factors into actionable steps that you and your team can take to improve the marketing and return-on-investment from your entertainment programming.
Broadly, we find hotels in two categories:
Situation 1: Resorts where in-house guests make up the vast majority of the customers at the F&B outlets, and where the resort wants guests to stay on-property during their entire stay to capture as much as those in-house guests’ spending as possible. These tend to be in vacation destinations, and sometimes remote locations.
Common goals for this situation are:
Ensuring guests know about the programming on property so they stay and spend money, rather than going off-site
Driving new business by marketing the entertainment program as a unique and special reason why guests should choose to stay at the property
Driving repeat business by delivering a positive experience with the entertainment programming.
If you are in this situation, make sure in-house guests are informed of your entertainment program in a stylish and exciting way. It is surprising how few hotels and resorts do this well and it is a missed opportunity which costs nothing but some extra effort and coordination between the F&B and Recreation Departments and the Marketing Department. When guests check in, they should be informed of the activity calendar with special emphasis placed on the entertainment taking place around the property. This should include photos, biographies, and QR codes with links for guests to get a taste of the style of entertainment. Cruise Ships do this quite well with the daily activity schedule (including entertainment) that is placed daily in each cabin. Hotel and Resorts would benefit from taking this approach to driving in-house guests to the entertainment activations. Live entertainment shows are always opportunities for guests to spend money and enhance their experience of the property and some creative marketing material goes a long way to encourage guests to attend.
Situation 2: Hotels where guests are more transient and where a larger percentage of the F&B customers might be locals who are not staying at the hotel. These tend to be smaller hotels, which may be located in business or vacation destinations.
Common goals for this situation are:
Driving more local patrons to the hotel’s F&B outlets, not just hotel guests
Providing curated, authentic local experiences that give guests a taste of the local flair in your location.
If you are in this situation, you must establish a process to curate these experiences in such a way that the uniqueness and quality of the live performances drives repeat business and develops a local following over time.
It is important to remember that it is almost always a short-sighted fallacy to think hiring a certain band will drive lots of new customers to your restaurant or bar. It might or it might not on any given occasion, but the fans of a certain band or DJ are extremely unlikely to be the same people who will become regulars at your restaurant. Therefore, the idea of accomplishing this goal by always getting bands or DJs with a following is like having to hit a home run 365 swings in a row!
The solution is to actually develop a product that is a cut above other entertainment offerings in the area. This is exactly the same idea as what you already strive to do by offering superior food, beverage, and service experiences. If those experiences are consistently high quality and stand out among other places in your area, you will develop repeat customers and a following over time. To accomplish this requires expertise in entertainment at a professional level—equivalent to what the sommelier knows about wine or the chef knows about food. It also requires going through a process of (1) defining the vision, (2) auditioning talent, (3) testing out the talent and getting feedback, and (4) iterating on that feedback until you have achieved a pool of truly superior artists who perform consistently at the highest level to give your guests an experience that is a cut above the rest.
Now that you have envisioned, designed, curated, and implemented a truly unique and authentic program, you can go about marketing it with confidence on your website, social media, and to in-house guests, as well as making a public relations push to generate local media buzz about the hottest new live entertainment program in town.
Activate Your Outlets
If you would like to discuss your property’s entertainment program and see how MHW can help, please contact us.
