Re-evaluate Your Marketing Plan with the Hotel Marketing Canvas
With the expected big recovery in the travel industry ahead, it’s a perfect time to re-evaluate your marketing strategy and tactics. Many hotels are going through their harshest times ever, and there’s little margin for error when it comes to being prepared for when demand returns. In this article, you can learn how to use the Hotel Marketing Canvas©, a framework for building a solid marketing & communications plan.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the highlights of each building block.
1. Your Audience – Get to Know Your Guests
Based on these insights you can then create audience profiles for each type, providing a clear picture of their characteristics, needs, wants, interests and potential touchpoints. This will help you tremendously in targeting the right people, with the right message on the right channel.
2. Your Brand – What Makes Your Hotel Stand Out
The ‘Audience’ and ‘Brand’ sections of this canvas serve as the foundation for a long-term profitable business. Without a clear picture on your market and without a distinctive brand identity, in the long run, your property will be a popular commodity at its best and empty at its worst. In the short run, you’ll be shooting in the dark when it comes to your marketing activation. So if you can’t answer the above questions easily, there’s some work to do before thinking about what marketing tactics to apply!
3. The Marketing Funnel – Following the Guest Journey
The objective of this building block is to have a clear understanding of your audience’s intention, the objective for your marketing efforts, the key message you should convey and the relevant touchpoints, activities and KPIs at each stage of the potential booker’s journey.
3.1 Intent & Objective of Your Lookers
3.2 Touch Points & Activities to Convince Lookers
3.3 KPIs for measuring success
4. Brand Fans – Turn Lookers and Bookers into Fans
To build up a valuable marketing pool, you would want to turn those dreamers, lookers but also bookers and happy guests, into fans of your brand. By converting them to followers and fans on your social channels or to subscribers of your newsletter, you can stay connected. Each piece of communication is another chance to inspire them and another opportunity to get them in the Marketing Funnel.
Using the Hotel Marketing Canvas for Different Audiences
The Hotel Marketing Canvas is a key technique for designing and implementing a successful marketing plan for a hotel. In the examples above we have focussed on the typical ‘leisure’ guests. The Hotel Marketing Canvas exercise can however be done for each audience profile you have created in the first building block. If you have a meeting venue, a restaurant or a bar, you will need to establish for each of them who you want to communicate to, what the key message should be, at which stage and on which touchpoint.
Many hotels went through the harshest times yet, so there’s no margin for error in being prepared for market recovery. Using a framework like the Hotel Marketing Canvas ensures that you allocate your budget, resources and focus on effective campaigns for a maximum return. To make the most out of the Hotel Marketing Canvas tool, you can download a free ebook that provides insights, tips, and checklists for your next brainstorming about a marketing (recovery) plan. Click here to download the “Hotel Marketing Canvas – For Successful Marketing Campaigns”.
Using a framework like the Hotel Marketing Canvas ensures that you allocate your budget, resources and focus on effective campaigns and communication for a maximum return.

Orange Hotel Marketing
Marketing Team
A Collective of Creative & Analytical Hotel Marketing Minds
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