Whatever your reason for writing a marketing budget, the smart, truly professional hospitality marketer will embrace the marketing budget process.
The real reason you’re doing a marketing budget is the same reason why you create a budget for your personal life. You need to allocate how you will spend your money, know the best way to do that and what your limits are. you’ll reap huge rewards once you start using your marketing budget by taking the time to do this in advance.
The most useful type of hotel marketing budget is a combination of the zero based budget and the historical based budget process. By reviewing the trends of expenses in the past (borrowed from the historical method) and looking at each expense anew (from the Zero Based Budget), you’ll be able to get the most accurate numbers for your budget.
You can carry out budgets annually, but if you carry out quarterly budgets you will gain greater flexibility to make speedy adjustments if a strategy isn’t working out for you. A quarterly budget also allows you to decide on strategy for only 90 days then decide if it’s one you want to continue with. When you’ve finished this combination method, run each line item as a % of sales against total revenue. When your revenue numbers fluctuate, “this % of ” will allow you to level the playing field for fast comparison.
And the golden rule: use the budget! Once created, your budget should be reviewed weekly or at the very least monthly.
Mediocre (or even under performing) hospitality professionals will never view their marketing budget as the return on investment tool it should be. And those same average professionals will probably never advance to their full potential. But managers who “get it”, that understand that the marketing money they are entrusted with is nothing more than seed money. This seed money needs to be planted and then return on this investment in the form of revenues (the return on the investment). At the very least, every tactic on your marketing plan should break even. It’s appalling how many marketing professionals spend money on strategies that don’t cover its costs.
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