Meilleurs conseils pour commercialiser et vendre des espaces de conférence et d'événements

“Sell experience. Not space.

Use your sales team to educate prospects on how to host the best event possible. That’s your golden ticket to stand out from the sea of beautiful properties out there.

Independent hotels, this is your chance to shine. Unlike branded chains, you have the flexibility to highlight what truly sets you apart: your team’s expertise on your website.

Too many hotels are missing out on revenue by not showcasing their team’s knowledge. Many of our partners find that over half of their small meeting opportunities come from planners with little to no experience. These newbies have a ton of questions and need a guiding hand, but most hotel websites are geared towards seasoned planners who are ready to submit an RFP.

Here’s a challenge:

• Visit your own website as if you’re a newbie planner just starting your research. How user-friendly is it?
• Do you offer resources, FAQs, a simple form for inquiries, or educational videos?

Prospects want to work with people they trust. Encourage your sales team to share their expertise and personality on social media, especially on LinkedIn, which is rolling out a video feed tab similar to TikTok. It’s an incredible tool for subject matter experts to educate prospects.

Sales get a whole lot easier when prospects already know who you are. So, be bold, be educational, and let your team’s expertise be the differentiator.”

“Targeting the decision makers of companies that may be interested in hiring conference and event spaces can be quite a challenge. Moreover, the competition can be fierce, especially in the bigger cities.

In terms of digital marketing channels, LinkedIn is the go-to for most as there are possibilities to target on job and company level, and the ads have room for visuals. However, you’ll have to have a reasonable budget and a big enough target audience. To make the budget spent worthwhile, it would be great if the business guests stay overnight as well. Think of that in your packaging and messaging.

As Microsoft owns LinkedIn, advertising through Bing with LinkedIn targeting could be an alternative.

If you want to attract local business only, you might be better off organising an event where you invite the companies you want to target. You can give them a tour around the property and network on a personal level.”

“Start by bundling packages to simplify the planning process and highlight clear value. Offering all-inclusive pricing that covers rooms, food, AV, and meeting space makes it easier for clients to understand and appreciate your offerings. When I was at Dolce Hotels and Resorts, our complete meeting packages streamlined decision-making and made our services more attractive. Additionally, unique value-add events like Iron Chef competitions, chefs tables, and food competitions keep attendees engaged and spending more on the property, enhancing their experience and driving additional revenue.

Focusing on team-building activities can add significant value to any event. Providing a variety of tailored team-building exercises meets the specific needs of clients and enriches their overall experience. At Dolce, our customised team-building activities were a key factor in our success, offering clients additional reasons to choose our venues. Emphasising your ability to offer flexible and customised solutions is also crucial. Showcase past events to illustrate your flexibility and creativity, helping potential clients visualise the possibilities.

Leveraging testimonials and case studies from past clients is essential for building credibility and trust. Sharing success stories and positive feedback highlights your track record of delivering seamless service and memorable experiences. At Dolce, testimonials from satisfied clients played a crucial role in attracting new business. Additionally, effective digital marketing and social media use is powerful. Run targeted online campaigns and engage potential clients through social media platforms to showcase your unique offerings and past successful events. Real-time updates and behind-the-scenes content drive significant interest and engagement.

Finally, offering detailed site tours and virtual walkthroughs of your event spaces can make a substantial impact. These immersive previews help potential clients visualise their events at your venue, making them more likely to commit. At Dolce, providing virtual tours allowed clients to explore our spaces remotely, facilitating their decision-making process. By bundling packages, creating engaging events, focusing on team-building, offering customisation, leveraging testimonials, utilising digital marketing, and providing immersive site tours, you can effectively market and sell your conference and event spaces, building lasting client relationships.”

“Show that the offering is unique. When creating content, immerse the reader into the experience that they will enjoy. Provide imagery and ensure your socials reflect the experience you are selling.”

“This depends on your target market. From a marketing standpoint, assisting sales with their reach and communications is key. Marketing can help create B2B newsletters by exporting segments from sales CRM, run targeted Google Ads/PPC campaigns, run social media campaigns (especially for social events like weddings/life events), targeted EproDirect or ConventionPlanIt campaigns, arrange a partnership with HotelPlanner, and create flyers/videos related to meeting space.”

“Planning a corporate event is a very complex process with a lot of moving parts. You can simplify the meetings/event planner job by:

• Having great website content about your meetings and events. Make it as descriptive as possible, including items such as floor plans, different configurations, audiovisual equipment, information on WiFi, etc.
• Having RFP capability on the website with immediate information response capabilities.
• Show your event space and group accommodation availability calendar tied to the property PMS and its Sales and Catering Module.
• Having Meeting/Event page creation capabilities powered by the website CMS (Content Management System) to enable customised event pages with an embedded booking engine with negotiated group rates. A client of ours had over 5,000 such event pages, enabling meeting planners to send an event page to the participants with the agenda, event info, booking capabilities, etc.
• For smaller corporate groups, hoteliers should enable a group booking engine like GroupSync Engage on their property website. GroupSync by Groups360 was created so that hotels could offer direct booking of guest rooms and hotel meeting spaces and is used by many independents, smaller, midsize and major brands like Accor, IHG, Hilton and Marriott.

Marketing of your meetings and events spaces and product is very straightforward:

• As mentioned, create a robust Meetings and Events section on the property website and optimise it for SEO.
  Launch search marketing campaigns around your meetings product. Meeting planners are searching for a number of keywords related to meetings, for example, “Conference hotel downtown Houston”, etc.
• Launch B2B content marketing initiatives around your meetings product to engage corporate group planners: LinkedIn posts and case studies, white papers, conference speakerships and panel participations, award announcements, sweepstakes, etc.
• Join the Cvent marketing initiatives.

Similar to the tentacles of an octopus, your B2B marketing gets the word out about the hotel, its meetings product and its value proposition, and plays an important role in engaging and enticing meetings and event planners to choose your hotel.”

“At RevenYou we work with small and independent accommodation suppliers. The biggest mistake we see them make is having no or dated photography. Humans are very visual and as such they want to see what they are contemplating buying.

If your photos are old, out of date, and blurry, no one is going to stop scrolling to look at your listing. When arranging a photo shoot, take the time to stage your rooms. Set them as you would for a variety of events. Boardroom, Cabaret, Theatre, Dinner. Add the flowers and the centrepieces. Put the time in to iron the tablecloths and add the lighting. Hide the cables, put the toilet seats down and remove the rubbish bins.

Ensure your photographer takes a variety of shots. Landscape for online travel agents and portrait for social media. Refresh your brochure annually and make sure it can be downloaded on your website so that people scrolling at 9pm at night can find answers immediately and don’t have to wait until you get into the office the next day.

Once you have great collateral and amazing photos: invest in staff training. Can the person who answers the phone sell? At RevenYou, we recently completed a series of competitor calls based purely on events and were shocked by the way in which the phone was answered. Out of ten hotels called, we received brochures from only five. One told us the person we needed to speak to was in meetings (so many meetings), another didn’t know how to transfer our call and a third could only help if we emailed our enquiry. Two didn’t answer the phone or return voicemails. We would have only booked one venue due to the confidence, excitement and genuine interest the salesperson had in our event. Know who you are competing against and how you can outsell them.

Next, create a prospect list based on past users, lost enquiries, future events, tours and groups, key agencies and key corporates travelling in your area. Get your best salesperson on the phone to start calling and ensure every call is followed up by sending your collateral. Keep a record of your calls and the conversations you had so you can revisit the call list next week and next month.”

“Reverse engineer who would actually need your space. The size and feel of a space will often determine who would be best suited to use it.

After you’ve done this, figure out your TAM (total addressable market) – who is the biggest market you can go after to use this space? For example weddings, business functions, small boutique expos? Determine the mass market.

Now develop a landing page tailored to addressing the problems and needs of that TAM. You may have one or more “TAM’s”, therefore develop a few landing pages that speak to that market.

Now run a test run – Leverage Facebook ads (And Google Ads if keyword search is high for a particular search term that matches what your TAM is searching for on Google). Place an ad with ZERO interest-based targeting (to give you the most reach with the lowest cost per click) with an ad that calls out specifically to one TAM to use your space for their intended end use (office function, expo, gala etc). Qualify the market on the ad level.

Now observe the Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate on a landing page. Whoever had the highest conversions and click-through rate on the ad will give you a hint as to who might find your space the most desirable. When you’re on the sales call don’t just talk nonsense. Ask specifically targeted questions like “What made you click on the ad and enquire?”, “What do you intend to use the space for?”, “Why do you want to use our space over another”, etc. This is vital information that will help you further understand your target market to optimise your campaign.

Now leverage this data to target that niche further and create an irresistible offer they would feel stupid refusing.

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If you have little money for advertising, you may want to reach out to event hosts on sites like meetup.com and provide your space for hire with something included for free to sweeten a deal that gets the word out about your space. You can then record the content of these events and simply boost your posts for $1 per day with zero interest-based targeting to give you the widest reach.

Whoever watches your content for more than 50% should be sent another video of testimonials.

Whoever watches this video over 50% should be sent a salesy irresistible offer video starting off the video with the exact words “Hey I see you’ve been watching our videos and we figured that maybe you’re interested in hiring the space…[present offer]… [add call to action]”.”

“One best practice would be to highlight unique features like location, technology, and flexibility.

Then, use virtual tours to showcase the space online and make it easy for potential clients to visualise their events – especially useful when they are based remotely. This is now becoming a given, so if you don’t do it, you are out of the race to start with.”