Rebecca Freeman, Head of Marketing, talks to us about her position within the No Ordinary team and shares some valuable marketing tips
It’s been an incredibly busy start to the year at No Ordinary Hospitality Management (NOHM), especially for the marketing team.
Across the group, we’re always looking at new initiatives and ways to grow performance across our channels.
Judging by just how popular our venues and events have been, the work we are doing is landing.
Christmas and New Year were back to pre-Covid levels at our flagship site, Coombe Abbey Hotel. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day were sell-outs and we’re excited to have just launched our new events season across Culture Host and wider as we see more of our visitors increasing their drive time to get to us.
My background in the hospitality world has helped me enormously since taking on the role with No Ordinary Hospitality Management back in 2021. I spent a significant amount of time at the Midlands’ largest creative agency, Linney, where I progressed from Account Manager to Digital Strategist and Head of Social Media. Working with F&B global brands including TGI Fridays, McDonalds and Compass Group gave me valuable industry knowledge to move many of our brands forward into the next phase of growth.
I am a big believer in data-driven, strategic marketing, so reporting and learning from results is essential. Understanding how your budget has been spent and the return on investment from marketing activity, helps us to prioritise workload and therefore run more effective campaigns. We do not like to be seen as busy fools!
We might be a creative team but we love process. As with any marketing team, we want to run projects on time, on budget and within scope. For us to do this, we have regular internal and agency meetings, to ensure we’re hitting deadlines – and we monitor all of this in the project management tool, Monday.com which is also a great reference point when reporting on activity.
As we continue to add more brands to our portfolio, it has never been more important to ensure we have a blueprint process to approach new marketing plans. This includes the identification of business objectives, audience personas, suited channels and an agreement of what success looks like. We’re also proud brand ambassadors and will work closely with our design partners to ensure content is always on-brand and consistent.
I’ve continuously had to manage multiple clients and that sets me in good stead to oversee marketing for the varied NOHM portfolio and partners from Coombe Abbey Hotel through to our 1950s Inspired American Dessert Diner, The Sundae Club.
To share a brief case study, at Coombe Abbey Hotel we achieve results way above industry standard, our social media cost per click sits at 34p where industry standard is 75p. Our website conversation rate is seven per cent with industry sitting at 2.4 per cent and finally, our click rate for email marketing is 11.5 per cent with an industry rate of 1.4 per cent. An increase in revenue year-on-year emphasises how well our marketing activity is performing, and we continue to focus on digital marketing as we look forward to a future where using artificial intelligence will be a must and Tik Tok will continue to be a huge driver to bring in business to venues.
We’ve enjoyed lots of positive media coverage too – from radio interviews on Valentine’s Day through to articles in business and trade press to help us reach a wider audience who want to use NOHM’s services to help improve their commercial business.
So, if you are in the hospitality sector, and you’d like some support with your marketing plans and activity, we’d love to chat with you about how we can help. You can contact me directly for more information at rebecca@noordinaryhospitality.com
