Resort Marketing Strategy: How Multi-Property Resorts Scale Marketing Without Losing Brand Control

If you want to draw potential guests to your resort, you must break away from traditional hotel marketing strategies and build a cohesive plan that positions your destination as the dream getaway your audience has been looking for.

Traditionally, marketing strategies for resorts lean heavily on storytelling. While you still need a compelling story, you must also maintain brand cohesiveness and messaging consistency across every channel and property.

A modern resort marketing strategy strikes the ideal balance between centralized governance and local agility. Your marketing plan should give location managers the latitude to customize content for their target audience while leveraging the brand equity you’ve worked so hard to build.

Our guide outlines how to create winning marketing strategies for resorts, and how you can use hospitality asset management technology to promote brand consistency at scale.

What Makes Resort Marketing Different From Traditional Hospitality Marketing?

Marketing strategies for resorts have some similarities with hotel marketing. But executing your plan while engaging in effective reputation management at scale can prove far more difficult in the resort space.

Maintaining brand consistency becomes exponentially harder as the number of properties grows. A single-location hotel can thrive if the manager closely oversees marketing efforts and approves key assets. However, a resort portfolio that includes several different regions and ownership structures cannot lean on the same level of direct oversight. It’s just not practical.

Additionally, seasonality plays a much bigger role. Resort attendance is deeply influenced by weather, school calendars, regional travel trends, and local events. Therefore, your corporate team needs a plan that can support a wide range of marketing trends and campaign types. These campaigns are often running simultaneously in different geographies.

Finally, decentralized execution adds a new layer of risk. The team overseeing each property needs autonomy to market to local demographics. But without the proper guardrails in place, that autonomy can lead to outdated logos and non-compliant messaging showing up in social media marketing and email marketing campaigns. If off-brand creatives enter the market, it can erode the trust you’ve cultivated over time.

What Is a Modern Resort Marketing Strategy?

A modern resort marketing strategy is a living model that adapts to seasonal trends and user preferences. At the enterprise level, it defines how brand standards are created, distributed, localized, and enforced across all of your properties. It serves as a single source of truth for content marketing, paid ad campaigns, loyalty programs, and on-site assets.

There are two main components to a modern resort marketing strategy: a centralized strategy and a distributed execution model. The result is a scalable system where you achieve the desired speed while maintaining control over how your brand is presented across every property and touchpoint.

Common Marketing Challenges for Multi-Location Resorts

Be prepared to run into a slew of challenges when planning marketing campaigns for multi-location resorts. Some of the biggest hurdles you will encounter include the following:

Brand Inconsistency Across Properties

Without centralized control over your marketing assets, properties often create their own variations of content. While property managers need the freedom to customize certain elements, such as dates and addresses, they cannot have absolute autonomy. If you give them too much latitude without any guardrails, logos, colors, and messaging will likely become off-brand.

Consumers expect consistency when interacting with your brand, regardless of which format or property they are connecting with. A luxury hotel, oceanfront resort, and mountainside retreat within your portfolio need to speak to the needs of their specific audiences. However, the underlying brand identity must remain the same.

Slow Campaign Execution and Approvals

Brands that manually approve every campaign or asset via endless email chains cannot muster the speed necessary to capitalize on seasonal trends. This can be especially detrimental during peak seasons when speed matters most.

There are no quick fixes to this challenge. You will need to solve slow campaign execution bottlenecks with a combination of new technologies and policy changes. That way, individual site managers can make minor customizations using pre-approved assets, which eliminates the need for case-by-case approval requests. 

When they do need authorization, the pipeline won’t be clogged with redundant requests.

Limited Visibility Into Asset Usage

Corporate teams often lack insight into which properties are using approved materials and which assets are outdated. Some locations may be using an outdated template that is stored locally instead of relying on the latest variation that includes up-to-date messaging and logos.

Without visibility into asset usage, you cannot identify which pieces of content resonate most with your target audience. Let’s say one property manager has come up with an effective marketing idea using a specific combination of approved assets. If you do not know which content they are using, it becomes difficult to repeat their success at scale.

As a result, your entire digital marketing plan becomes less effective, which hurts your bottom line and leads to fewer bookings and lower occupancy rates.

Seasonal Complexity and Regional Variation

Manually managing overlapping campaigns in different regions while targeting various audiences is a recipe for disaster. The more manual steps are involved in your marketing channels, the harder it is to act with the sort of speed that the hospitality industry demands.

Automation is part of the solution, as you can deliver high-quality assets to each luxury resort at scale. You also need standardized rules that promote independence among local businesses.

Centralized asset management is the final piece of the puzzle for overcoming this challenge. Without it, the timing of seasonal campaigns will be off, which will make the content less effective and lead to a diminished online presence while your competitors are firing on all cylinders.

Core Pillars of an Effective Resort Marketing Strategy

Before you create a complete marketing plan for your resort portfolio, you need to define the essential pillars first. A comprehensive resort marketing strategy consists of these non-negotiable elements:

Centralized Brand Governance

First and foremost, provide property managers with a single source of truth to promote effective governance. Brand standards, templates, and approved messaging must be available in your centralized repository to promote consistency and compliance.

If a property manager has a question about search engine optimization (SEO), influencers, running Google Ads, or publishing content on TikTok, they should be able to find the answers they need in your governance resources. The goal is to promote autonomy and clarity.

Local Flexibility With Built-In Guardrails

Next, create guardrails for your marketing plan. These policies should outline what property managers can do on their own and what requires approval. The goal is to raise brand awareness in a competitive market while protecting your unique value proposition in the resort and hotel industry.

For example, your guardrails might outline what elements of assets a property manager can customize without prior approval and what types of engaging content they can publish independently. Giving property managers the autonomy to customize content for their target market is great for promoting regional connections.

On the other hand, allowing them to plan influencer marketing campaigns and choose partners independently may be too risky. You have to decide what guardrails are appropriate at the corporate level.

Scalable Campaign Execution

You don’t want to start from square one every time you plan a new campaign. The best resort marketing strategies can be designed once, customized slightly, and deployed many times. The goal is to minimize friction for local teams, as they lack the time and resources to build new campaigns from scratch.

Give them scalable content and plans that they can fine-tune for their target market. That’s how you achieve marketing sustainability in the resort and travel industry.

Consistent Guest Experience Across Touchpoints

Finally, make sure that your initiatives promote consistency at every turn. Each time a guest interacts with your brand, it should feel like part of the same story.

This applies to digital and on-property touchpoints, including emails, signage, and check-in. They should know what brand they are interacting with and look forward to the next time they visit one of your properties.

Creating a strong online reputation and maintaining it with consistency will lead to better conversion rates and higher occupancy. When you follow up on this consistency with unique experiences for guests, your brand will stand out in the competitive hospitality space.

Marketing Strategies for Resorts Managing Multiple Properties

After you’ve addressed the foundational pillars of resort marketing, it’s time to implement specific strategies to make your brand stand out. Here are four ways to win more guests and increase your bookings:

Centralized Brand Hubs for Resort Marketing Teams

Marketing assets should not be managed and stored at the resort level. That’s how outdated assets slip through the cracks and make their way into marketing campaigns. Instead, build a centralized hub that resort marketing teams can turn to when they need the latest pre-approved content for their next campaign.

A centralized solution also provides clarity to corporate decision-makers. You can track which assets are being used and which resources are going untouched. If a particular asset or campaign is performing well, find out why and share what you learn with other property managers. You can build on winning ideas and help each property book more stays.

Customizable Templates for Property-Level Marketing

Templates are one of the most valuable tools for promoting consistency at scale. You can give property managers the freedom to customize certain elements while locking other components of your assets, such as the logo or corporate-approved slogan.

Property managers can tap into their local market knowledge and show off their creativity without inadvertently undermining brand equity. It’s the best way to promote localized content at scale without relying on inefficient manual approvals.

Seasonal and Promotional Campaign Rollouts at Scale

Timing is everything, especially when capitalizing on seasonal trends or promotional campaigns. However, getting every property on the same page can be incredibly challenging when you are working under a time crunch.

Centralizing assets and putting effective guardrails in place makes it easier to time your seasonal campaigns across all properties, all at once. Site managers can move with necessary consistency and speed without cutting corners on quality.

Distributed Marketing With Corporate Oversight

A distributed marketing model is one of the best ways to tap into the cumulative talent and knowledge of local teams without compromising your brand standards. Corporate retains visibility and control while individual properties execute independently. This model reduces bottlenecks that can lead to missed deadlines without sacrificing governance.

Supporting Direct Bookings With Brand-Led Resort Marketing

While acquiring bookings through travel agencies or websites like Tripadvisor or Booking.com can still benefit your bottom line, direct bookings are the most valuable. To achieve that, you need consistent, brand-controlled marketing so you can encourage guests to book directly through your website.

Use a variety of channels and tactics while providing a consistent experience. Every touchpoint needs to feel like it’s coming from your brand, because it is. You want users who connect with your resort through organic search engine results, social channels, and paid ads to walk away with the same level of confidence in your decision.

Maintaining Brand Consistency Across Digital and Print Channels

Exercising control over the messaging and design of both print and digital assets is crucial for consistency. Any resource that is going to be used at one of your properties must promote established values and your mission while lending itself to a better guest experience.

Centralization is the only practical way to achieve this level of consistency. When you can exercise centralized control without relying on constant manual oversight, you will be able to market to each property’s unique audience while protecting the equity that gives you an edge.

Measuring and Optimizing Resort Marketing Execution Across Locations

With the right asset management technologies at your disposal, you can measure key metrics, such as:

• Asset usage
• Adoption by property
• Individual asset impact

Additionally, you can identify gaps and what’s causing them. Use these insights to address deficiencies in performance media metrics at their source. When you know why an asset is underperforming, you can fix the problem and get noticed by the right audiences.

How Enterprise Resort Brands Operationalize These Strategies

While the value in these strategies is undeniable, bringing them to life can still feel like a monumental task. Leading resort organizations begin by moving away from one-off campaigns in favor of repeatable systems. To achieve this, they:

• Document workflows
• Create guardrails
• Standardize templates
• Implement a scalable platform for managing assets

Together, these steps allow you to turn marketing into an operational edge that helps you deliver better guest experiences while benefiting your bottom line.

Why Platform-Driven Execution Is Critical for Scalable Resort Marketing

Technology is what connects all of the dots. A platform like MarcomCentral provides you with the operational layer necessary to achieve centralized control and rapid execution. It gives you real-time visibility into assets and marketing efforts without forcing your corporate team to micromanage local property leaders.

When combined with a sound strategy, these platforms make your plan executable at scale. If you are operating across multiple properties and regions, having the right digital tools at your disposal is non-negotiable for long-term marketing success.

Building a Scalable, Brand-Safe Resort Marketing Strategy

As your resort portfolio grows, you need a flexible, agile strategy that can keep pace with the expectations of today’s guests. You also need a powerful platform to support your revamped marketing plan. MarcomCentral is that platform. With our technology, you can move from fragmented asset management to centralized execution and tight oversight.

Ready to rethink how you approach resort marketing? Request a demo to learn more about how MarcomCentral can support your resort marketing strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Resort Marketing Strategy?

A resort marketing strategy is an enterprise-level framework that defines how your resort brand plans, governs, and executes marketing across all locations and channels. A winning strategy will offer the right mix of governance and localized execution so that you can effectively speak to the needs of each audience.

How Do Resorts Manage Marketing Across Multiple Locations?

There are several different approaches to multi-location marketing management. Using manual approval processes and shared drives is one option, although it becomes increasingly inefficient as your portfolio grows. A more pragmatic approach involves using a centralized platform to standardize governance, asset distribution, and approvals.

Why Is Brand Consistency Critical for Resort Marketing?

Guests expect you to deliver consistent quality and professionalism across every location and touchpoint. When you meet their expectations, it builds trust and encourages future bookings. Inconsistent messaging or visuals weaken brand equity and can lead to reduced loyalty.

How Do Resorts Scale Seasonal Marketing Campaigns Efficiently?

Resorts scale their seasonal campaigns by creating a centralized source of assets and unified guardrails. With the right technology, corporate leaders can deploy approved assets across all properties simultaneously while maintaining consistent messaging and design standards.