THATBlog

Many hotel brands are deeply conflicted about how they should manage their marketing services. Frankly, this is a debate that happens in all verticals, and often there isn’t an obvious answer. Below, we outline some pros and cons of choosing to hire a digital marketing agency for your hotel’s marketing efforts as opposed to hiring additional in-house staff. To be fair, we are biased, as we are an agency with a successful track record of working with hotel brands in the digital space. However, our experience has taught us the pros and cons of the agency/hotel brand relationship.

Agency Pros

Expertise

Before we harp on this point, let us preface it by saying that working for a hotel brand doesn’t make you less knowledgeable than someone who works for an agency. However, we will say that agencies interact with many different brands, in different verticals, and with different budget sizes. Agencies do have an edge when it comes to expertise because they are forced to constantly evolve, problem solve, and innovate more quickly than people who work in-house. A hotel marketing agency sees the same scenario from a few different perspectives due to the force-fed experience they get from their different clients.

Collaboration

Unless you have the luxury of being a Hilton or Marriott, it’s likely that your “teams” consist of individual people who are the leads for their respective departments. These hardworking individuals are often a Jack of All Trades and a master of none. However, if they collaborate with a knowledgeable agency partner, there are a number of ways they can add even more value to their company. When hotels collaborate with agencies that provide marketing services, they are getting support, thought leadership, and expert execution of initiatives that would usually be way too much work for even the most talented employee.

Tactical Execution

Does your hotel’s marketing manager know the intricacies of the Facebook Algorithm, Google Algorithm, or how social media ads perform at auction? If you said no to any of these, your hotel would greatly benefit from the tactical execution that a hotel marketing agency can provide. Not to say your staff can’t learn the ins and outs of these concepts, however, we would say that they probably have other daily tasks that outweigh learning how to tactically execute a strategy in an impactful way. Agencies have a ton of experience with social media channels, search engines, and paid media. Tasking them with the execution of your hotel marketing campaigns is oftentimes your best bet.

Cost-Effectiveness  

There is a common misconception that hiring a digital marketing agency to help with your hotel marketing initiatives is too expensive. In reality, hiring an agency is actually much more time and cost-effective than hiring an in-house employee. Typically, agencies recommend a certain amount of retainer hours for marketing services. Let’s say that your hotel is in need of social media marketing services that cover content creation, content distribution, community management, and social listening. A rough ballpark estimate for these services is 10 hours per month. At the estimated average of $100 per hour for 10 hours per month, you are looking at $12,000 per year (plus any media spend). Now, think about the in-house employee that you are looking to hire (one person) that you would hopefully employ for the foreseeable future. What does their salary look like? According to PayScale.com, the average Social Media Manager’s salary in the US is $52,379. This figure doesn’t include insurance, taxes, 401k, subsequent raises, oversight costs, or the cost of turnover if they aren’t the right fit. For $12,000, you could get access to a team of professionals that are supporting your hotel brand, or for $52,000+ you could hire one employee that you hope the hiring manager made the right choice about. The fun part about this made-up scenario is that depending on your hotel’s size and structure, you might not even need 10 hours of services, so the cost of a partnership would be even less!

Agency Cons

Transparency

It would be silly for us to act like all agencies are created equal. Let’s be realistic, some agencies thrive on a lack of transparency in order to avoid being held accountable for their work. Choosing the wrong hotel marketing agency can waste a lot of time and money. Make sure that, if you choose to partner with an agency, they commit to providing you full reporting, account management, detailed strategy, and access to your point of contact at all times. We often encounter hotel brands that are sour on digital marketing agencies due to a negative past experience. This does happen, however, the right agency can take your brand (and revenue) to the next level.

Inside Culture/Brand Knowledge

Nobody knows your brand better than you do. No matter what an agency does, they will never quite equal the inside culture and brand knowledge that an internal employee will have. However, an agency that is good at what they do will know how to tease that knowledge and passion out to create content and campaigns to achieve your bottom-line goals. An agency partnership shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it” relationship. Fueling the marketing fire with your brand knowledge and passion is a great way to book rooms!

Communication

Ease of communication is sometimes a concern for hotel brands when considering an outside agency. It can be easy to let the agency do its thing and wait for reports at the end of the month or quarter. We highly recommend having open lines of communication and frequent touchpoints to ensure that everyone is always on the same page when it comes to your campaigns. If the agency you are considering doesn’t place client communication high on its list, choose a different agency. Communication is the key to building a relationship with an agency that stays on track towards your goals.

This is definitely not an end-all, be-all list. There are many other pros and cons of working with an agency for your hotel’s digital marketing campaigns. At the end of the day, you have to do what’s best for your business, and we wholeheartedly believe that hiring a talented digital marketing agency is the best route to go.

Don’t know where to start? Take a look at this great guide on 5 questions you should ask when hiring a hotel marketing agency!