[Video] How to have a ‘Million dollar month’ with Schulte Hotels

Cross-channel planning to boost hotel bookings

After delivering back-to-back ‘million-dollar months’ for Schulte Hospitality, Director of Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Michelle Klein, joined us at the Direct Booking Summit to share her strategy to help you do the same.

Having a million dollar month, or stringing multiple million dollar months together, requires a combination of careful cross-channel planning with reactiveness and experimentation.

Michelle has seen it done in many different ways across many different types of hotel. Some have relied heavily on OTAs, paid search and meta and seen success. Others have had evenly split spend and return across multiple paid channels and combined this with good PR and organic social activity.

5 levers hotels can pull to maximize monthly revenue

The main levers Michelle pulled to help hotels increase their chances of achieving a million dollar month include:

• Collaboration and planning: The first step towards success is to set out a yearly roadmap of key channels, initiatives and time periods. This roadmap is created in collaboration with revenue, sales, agencies and hotel leaders. Layered in are occupancy, flash sales and major focuses. The plan should be flexible, but the existence of the plan with cross-functional buy-in gives marketing a much greater chance of success.
• Paid search: Don’t just ‘set and forget’. Find the right partner to take a data first, active approach. Michelle worked with a couple of partners before landing with Triptease’s Paid Search product. She saw an improvement of 3.6 ROAS in 2022 to 7.3 ROAS in 2023.
• Paid social: Having a well-timed annual sale and constantly refreshing ads saw an improvement of 15:1 ROAS to 20:1 ROAS in one year. Michelle refreshed the ads quarterly, or more regularly if there were special offers.
• Email marketing: With simple rebrand and email design improvements Michelle was able to help a Wyoming hotel start generating significantly higher returns. The next step is segmentation and more granularity with email campaigns, and the introduction of Triptease Cart abandonment emails.
• Organic social and PR: Michelle has been able to use organic social to drive as much as 20% of website traffic and up to 28 bookings from social per month with consistency, creativity and good use of imagery. She also worked with local media partners to be included in roundup articles, with three articles driving $3.5k in revenue.
• Website design. It’s important to have a website that encourages conversion. A modernized website with smoother user journeys and enticing imagery improved conversion rates from 1.6% to 2.2%. This makes an enormous difference over a month or quarter.