Lotus Marketing's Work
Lotus is not your typical agency, as our team contains marketing strategists with diverse backgrounds in revenue, sales, and marketing within the hospitality industry. Understanding the industry and ecosystem is what we do best. As a result, we partner with clients and strategize on the best way to drive revenue, impact need times, and pivot on marketing direction when business needs change.
Launches & Openings
Opening and converting hotels is a niche expertise that only comes with deep knowledge of the hospitality industry. Lotus Marketing is an agency with unparalleled experience in launching hotels — collectively our team has opened hundreds of hotels across dozens of brands.
Some of our core competencies include:
- Managing the hotel’s digital footprint — especially with brand conversions
- Articulating top selling features and providing hotel copy for hotel websites and sales collateral
- Coordinating pre-opening renderings and stock photography in pre-opening
- Hotel business positioning and activation
- Photo and video shoot planning and shoot preparation
- Grand opening activations and events
Our philosophy has always been to optimize all marketing channels prior to opening to accelerate hotel performance and drive revenue upon opening.
We recognize that on-property resources are so thin in pre-opening. As such, we’ve designed specific marketing packages and ala carte services to support the gaps that a pre-opening hotel may have.
Renovations
Whether the renovation has an invasive impact to the public spaces or simply takes guest rooms or meeting space out of inventory, Lotus Marketing is adroit at tackling renovations.
Not only does our hospitality agency plan for the post-renovation marketing to drive awareness and generate excitement for the new product, but we also plan for open renovations requiring specific attention on mitigating the impact to the guest experience and optimizing revenue throughout the renovation.
From the GM’s letter to in-house guests to a “surprise and delight” at check-in, Lotus Marketing is a tremendous resource for renovation best practices and recommendations. Beyond the niceties, Lotus Marketing consults with the hotel on the sense of arrival, traffic paths, and ways to merchandise temporary spaces. Guest interaction with these temporary spaces not only drives engagement but also helps to keep guest satisfaction strong.
As the typical revenue streams and hotel segmentation are disrupted during a renovation, Lotus Marketing works with the hotel to pivot the marketing efforts to support these alternative opportunities. From stronger promotional support of outlets to better merchandising for grab-and-go items, Lotus Marketing can devise an interim marketing strategy to help optimize revenues during a renovation.
Enterprise Solutions
Lotus Marketing provides turnkey field marketing solutions for hotel companies and management companies alike. We offer a scalable marketing infrastructure to support the broader hotel portfolio, administer marketing programs, and fill any gaps in the organizational or marketing process structure. Our agency delivers best-in-class, on-brand hospitality marketing support and can integrate with any existing tools, resources and preferred vendors you may already have in place.
Some of the more common enterprise solutions we work on include:
Administer enterprise level processes, including:
- Naming Protocol
- Website Content and SEO
- Centralized Paid Media Program
Develop brand level programs, including:
- Parent/Child Social Media Infrastructure
- Brand Playbook Pull Through (Social Media, SEO, Photography Standards & Guidelines, Marketing, etc.)
- Brand Collateral Template Development
- Identify Brand Swim Lanes
- Manage a collection of individual hotels - ensure that the integrity of the portfolio while scaling to deliver on the individual hotel basis
Provide turnkey field-marketing solutions at global, continent and destination levels, including:
- Property Specific Marketing Account Management
- Offers Catalog, Local Promotional Toolkit, B2B & B2C Campaigns
- Outlet Marketing Support
Soft Brands and Independent Hotels
Although soft-branded and independent hotels have the latitude to provide a truly unique hospitality experience, the lack of a branded hotel flag in their marketing strategy can provide challenges in the areas of awareness and brand credibility. This is especially prevalent in hotel openings where new soft-branded hotels will typically take longer to ramp than flagged brands.
Establishing a comprehensive and distinctive hotel identity is the critical success factor for any soft-brand or independent hotel. Well beyond the brand narrative, the hotel needs a detailed brand style guide to include design standards, photography guidelines, and tone. In addition, the hotel needs a comprehensive action plan to ensure the hotel positioning is represented at every consumer touchpoint within the hotel. Lotus Marketing understands this foundation is critical to sustaining long-term success. Before any marketing strategies and tactics are deployed, Lotus Marketing collaborates with the hotel to ensure this groundwork is established and thorough.
Destination Marketing
Destination Marketing can mean two different things for a hospitality marketing agency. First, Lotus Marketing supports DMOs and CVBs with the room night goals and economic impact to a destination. From merchandising the destination for leisure travelers to comprehensive contact management strategies to move citywide group rooms, Lotus Marketing partners with destinations to meet their business goals.
Our tenured, high-performing marketers have worked for a broad spectrum of hospitality-related organizations, which gives us extensive industry segment knowledge including group (corporate, association, intermediary, social), business transient (direct and agent), and leisure (direct, OTAs, wholesale).
Second, destination marketing can also mean developing and administering a cooperative campaign for a cluster of hotels within a geographic territory. These marketing programs can be structured to target group or leisure segments and may include promotional partnerships, content and social media, PR, and digital campaigns.
Restaurants and Entertainment Venues
Whether the venue is in a hotel or standalone, Lotus Marketing provides comprehensive hospitality marketing support to restaurants and entertainment venues. Delivering essential branding components such as logo creation, positioning, and style guide development, the Lotus Marketing agency sets the foundation for long-term success.
We can develop all the operational materials an outlet may need such as menus, digital menus, television screen content, and wayfinding signage. In addition, we can build out the marketing plan and strategies and execute against the marketing tactics such as website development, social media development and management, media and advertising, and PR management.