Hotel group sales teams, selling to both the corporate and the SMERF markets, often underestimate and even ignore the power of digital marketing and online initiatives to drive more group bookings.

Similar to the tentacles of an octopus, your B2B marketing - the marketing of your corporate meetings and events spaces and SMERF group amenities - gets the word out about the hotel, its group product and its value proposition, and plays an important role in engaging and enticing group planners and organizers to choose your hotel.

Selling group business online requires a multi-pronged approach:

Having a great website content about your corporate meetings and events, as well as amenities for SMERF groups. Make it as descriptive as possible, including items such as floor plans, different configurations, audiovisual equipment, information on WiFi, parking spaces for buses, complimentary offerings for tour leaders and drivers, 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 or SMERF Group 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.

Create Complete Meeting Packages (CMPs) to enable corporate event planners plan and budget corporate events.

Invest in SEO to get your website appear high in the rankings of search results; in AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) to appear in the answer boxes and AI overviews, in GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to get citations and recommendations (ex. on ChatGPT).

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 Cvent marketing initiatives.

Max Starkov
Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant & Strategist

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