CHARLESTON, South Carolina—Charlestowne Hotels enhances its standards of hospitality management through its fully integrated strategic marketing division, a service not typically offered by third-party management companies.
Charlestowne’s in-house team operates like its own creative agency, handling all aspects of marketing across its portfolio of more than 50 hotels. Bundling together services that often require hoteliers to work with outside vendors, hoteliers are provided with an arsenal of tools. This includes strategic planning, project management, print and digital media development, paid media management, CRM & email deployment, analytics reporting, and creative services (graphic design, production/fulfillment, photography/videography). In fact, compared to third-party agency contracts, the properties in Charlestowne’s portfolio—which include lifestyle, adaptive reuse, collegiate, and condo-hotels—benefit from financial savings due to the company’s marketing division.
Through its strategic marketing division, Charlestowne is further supporting its mission as an operations-led management company. General managers and on-site hotel operators are able to focus on on-site programming, staff culture, and the personalized guest experience, while Charlestowne’s marketing team handles future promotional planning and activation work designed to raise each property’s profile among markets. The marketing team’s position within the corporate office also enables them to work directly with revenue managers and adjust the promotional strategy in real-time as revenue forecasts change.
“Creating an in-house agency culture is an incredibly difficult task for independent-centric management companies,” says Michael Cady, vice president of marketing for Charlestowne Hotels, whose previous experience includes more than two decades in marketing and advertising within agency and corporate environments. “We’ve invested in building a powerhouse team of talented and entrepreneurial specialists who are driven by ROI and executing on campaigns that increase top-line revenue for our hotels. By creating this specialized department within our corporate office, we’re consistently able to fire on all cylinders of marketing, which enables our on-site team to focus on creating memorable guest experiences.”
Committed to management, Charlestowne Hotels develops marketing plans for the over 50 hotels in its portfolio based on each hotel’s individual identity and needs. The company’s reputation for brand building has extended to full brand development projects. In the last three years, the marketing team has conceptualized more than 20 new hotels, 40 websites, and 15 F&B concepts from scratch—inclusive of brand identity, imagery, logo, and design development—providing each asset with its own personality. These services, along with the company’s integrated marketing services, ensure Charlestowne’s clients receive output and savings.
