Promotional Materials And Activity

Most hotels have a very strong local market, which responds well to tactical sales promotion activity. Traditional activity works very well if it is planned properly but efforts to make your internet site effective will be well rewarded.

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion is a great way of counteracting competitor activity, converting prospects into customers or launching new facilities. Tactical mailing distributed door-to-door is an excellent way of promoting new restaurant openings, new menus or new facilities such as a leisure club.

The simplest promotions are price based. There are conflicting views on the wisdom of these. Consumers can be rather sceptical, particularly if you over use ‘special prices’. When does a sale price become the normal price and then cease to have any value?

Sales promotion techniques tend to be used more in the retail sector where there is an imperative to generate market share or launch new products in a crowded market. These promotions can be directed to the consumer, to sales staff, to retailers and to wholesalers. They can involve:

coupons
discounts
contests
point of sale displays
rebates
gifts and incentives.

Hotels have not traditionally been seen as a service where consumers would normally expect a price promotion. However if you choose your media carefully your image will not be damaged. Some of the weekday lunch promotions in up-market daily newspapers are very effective at bringing in new customers to even the most prestigious hotel or restaurant. Most people are up for a deal, whoever they are or however much they earn. It is a moot point whether or not these sort of promotions build long-term customer relationships, although sales promotion is also an effective way of promoting the facilities you have to your current guests.

Leaflets

If you do produce leaflets to promote any element of your business you need to take great care with the production. This is not to say that it needs to be particularly expensive, but it does need to be appropriate to the product that you are promoting. If you have a high quality restaurant with an expensive menu, then any promotional leaflet needs to be of good quality; a flimsy 80gsm production will not do.

Just as with advertising and direct mail, getting attention is the key to success. If you plan a door-to-door mailing then mixing your leaflet up with all the others in a generic mailing or inserting in free newspapers will not work. It would be difficult enough to grab attention if you handed a copy to each prospect individually, so the least you can do is drop the leaflet through each door on its own.

Writing copy for a leaflet is the same as writing for direct mail or advertising. You need to grab your readers’ attention and make them interested enough to take whatever action you want. You also need some of the techniques of a poster, where you keep the copy to a minimum and just give enough information for the decision to be made.

Leaflets are associated with offers and offers are designed to attract new prospects. Always:

Put the offer in the headline so it is seen immediately.
Make the offer easy to understand.
Make the offer specific.
Say exactly what needs to be done to take up the offer.
Add a special incentive for acting today.
Give options for responding (phone, e-mail, fax etc).
Put a deadline on the offer.

Banners

Banners can be really effective, but they can also be really awful. It is all in the execution. Some of those building wraps that you see in city centres are really impressive and convey a great image about the building project that is under construction. Banners work when they are very temporary and convey something that is time related. Often the information refers to a price promotion or an announcement of a new facility.

Viewers need to be surprised and intrigued enough to assimilate the few words that it is possible to put on any banner. As with any signage, the quality of the banner must be consistent with the image of your hotel. You can buy really cheap versions but you need to spend the right money to stay consistent with your image in the market. Make sure that you work out how to fix the banner before you order it and ensure that the scale of the banner fits the situation. Torn and broken banners that stay up for months really do not do you any favours.

If you have an interesting calendar of events in your restaurant then a series of banners can be effective, so long as you distinguish one from the other and make sure that the right announcement goes up at the right time. But the big proviso is that banners are only cost-effective if you have a good level of passing traffic, either on foot or by car.