The hospitality marketplace is an entanglement of choices that meeting and event planners must sift through when selecting a venue. In the past several years, due mainly to the efforts of Unique Venues and our partner educational organizations such as ACCED-I, ACUHO-I, ACUI, CUCCOA and NACAS, we have made the option of using a college or university campus a more viable and “top of mind” option.
But for YOUR campus to be top of mind with planners, Unique Venues highly recommends implementing these critical best practices for marketing your campus conference and event venue.
In this 5 part series of posts, campus venues can learn the 5 best practices for marketing your campus.
Part 3: Create a budget and have a plan to market your venue.
The average hotel venue spends 5.7% of their total gross revenue on marketing and selling their property to potential customers. While this figure may seem high, it is critical to have access to funds to adequately compete in a very crowded marketplace.
Ideally, I would suggest that you allocate a minimum of 3% of gross conference revenue in order to implement a highly targeted marketing and sales effort. Our most successful campus venues have used good, old-fashioined salesmanship to convince their supervisors along with return on investment data and the economic impact of what they do on campus to increase their budgets. You should too.
Author Bio: Chuck Salem is the president of Unique Venues, a marketing membership organization that brings together collegiate campus venues with meeting and event planners. Prior to Unique Venues, Chuck was employed as the Assistant Vice President for Conference and Auxiliary Services at the University of Pittsburgh's Johnstown campus where he established the award-winning Conference Center at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Chuck is a past president of the Association of Collegiate Conference and Events Director International (ACCED-I).