HOSPITALITY GROUP MARKETING · SAN DIEGO
One Team Across the Whole Portfolio
Multi-unit marketing for restaurant groups, hotel portfolios and hospitality operators — shared systems and buying power, with each venue still allowed to be itself.
THE TWO WAYS THIS GOES WRONG
Five Agencies, or One Template
Groups usually arrive having tried one of two things. Either every venue has its own agency, freelancer or enthusiastic GM, and nothing is comparable, nothing is negotiated at scale and nobody can answer a simple question about total spend.
Or somebody centralised it, and now the steakhouse and the taco window are running the same posts with different logos, which flattens exactly the thing that made each place work.
The job is to centralise the parts that benefit from scale and localise the parts that do not. That is a boring answer and it is the whole discipline.
HOW WE SPLIT IT
Central Where It Scales, Local Where It Matters
Central: strategy, brand systems, media buying and negotiation, photography and video production, reporting, tooling, reservations and CRM architecture, and the review and listing infrastructure. These get better and cheaper the more venues you run through them.
Local: each venue's Google Business Profile and local search, neighbourhood partnerships, the calendar of that room, its voice, its regulars and its press. These get worse the moment you average them.
Then one reporting layer over the top, so you can see the group and any single venue in the same view and actually compare them. Most operators have never had that, which is why underperformance goes unnoticed for a quarter at a time.
WHAT WE DO
Hospitality Group Marketing Services
Six areas. Most groups start with reporting and local SEO, because you cannot allocate a budget sensibly until the venues are comparable.
Brand Architecture
How the group brand and each venue brand relate — what is shared, what is deliberately different, and which concepts should not visibly belong to the same owner at all.
Multi-Location Local SEO
A properly maintained Google Business Profile, listing set, review flow and local landing presence for every venue. Managed centrally, tuned per site. Run with SEO.
Consolidated Media Buying
One budget, allocated to the venues and dayparts that need it this month rather than split evenly out of politeness. Bought by our paid media team at group scale.
Shared Content Production
Photography and video shot across multiple venues in planned blocks, so per-venue cost drops sharply and every room has current assets instead of one good shoot from 2023.
Guest Data & CRM
One guest profile across venues where that is legal and sensible, so a regular at one room can be invited to another. Built with our marketing automation team.
Group Reporting
Covers, revenue, spend and cost per guest by venue, in one comparable view. Including the venues that are behind, named, with a reason rather than an excuse.
HOW AN ENGAGEMENT RUNS
The Formula for Group Marketing
Four stages. For a group of five or more venues, expect the rollout to take a quarter — doing it in a month means doing it badly.
01. Portfolio Audit
Every venue's local presence, spend, performance and assets, plus what each GM is doing independently that nobody upstream knows about.
02. Set the Split
Agree what is central and what stays local, venue by venue. Written down, so the argument happens once rather than every month.
03. Build the Systems
Brand kit, listing infrastructure, content calendar, media structure and one reporting layer. Rolled out venue by venue, not all at once.
04. Allocate on Evidence
Monthly review across the portfolio, with budget moving toward the venues and dayparts where it is currently returning most.
MIXED PORTFOLIOS
Hotels and Restaurants Do Not Share a Playbook
Plenty of operators run both. A hotel with two restaurants and a bar is four marketing problems, not one: the hotel is fighting OTA commission and booking windows measured in weeks, the restaurant is fighting a Tuesday and a booking window measured in hours.
They need different channels, different metrics and often different voices. What they can genuinely share is production, data, media negotiation and reporting — and the guest, who is the same person and should be treated like it.
We run hotel marketing and restaurant marketing as separate practices for exactly this reason, and this page is how they are coordinated when one owner has both.
BUILT FOR SAN DIEGO OPERATORS
Your Venues Are Not in the Same Market
A group with rooms in the Gaslamp, North Park and Del Mar is operating in three genuinely different markets — different guests, different cheque averages, different seasonality, different reasons for a slow night. Averaging them into one campaign is how a group ends up over-serving its strongest venue and starving the one that needed help.
We are at 770 First Avenue downtown and we work these neighbourhoods continuously across hotels, restaurants and bars. That is the part a national multi-unit agency cannot fake, and it is why our reporting is built to be read venue by venue rather than as a portfolio average.
This page is one part of the practice. We also run hotel marketing, restaurant marketing, destination and tourism marketing, event marketing and hospitality PR — the overview sits on our hospitality marketing page.
We work with businesses across Downtown, La Jolla, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Chula Vista, Oceanside, Escondido and Coronado — the full list is on our service areas page.
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What our Clients are saying
By far the best marketing company in San Diego! They are on top of it- the social posts are on time and the website updates and SEO are effective. They built a WordPress website for us and we couldn’t have been happier- highly recommended
Formula Marketing has been a phenomenal company to work with. The entire team is professional and very talented. They are clearly passionate about the work they do and have helped our business create an amazing social media presence, which has ultimately increased our sales tremendously. I highly recommend working with Formula Marketing!
Best marketing company in San Diego. They helped take my business to the next level. With Formula Marketing SD I truly feel like I have an amazing team on my side helping me every step of the way.
QUESTIONS
Hospitality Group Marketing FAQs
How much does group marketing cost?
Usually $6,000 to $25,000 a month plus media, depending on venue count and how much production is in scope. Per venue it lands well below what the same venues were paying separately, which is the main financial argument for consolidating in the first place.
How many venues do you need before this makes sense?
Around three. Below that the shared infrastructure costs more to build than it saves, and you are better served by restaurant or hotel marketing per property. Above five or six the reporting and media consolidation alone tends to justify the engagement.
Will every venue end up looking the same?
No, and that is the failure mode we design against. Shared systems, separate voices. What gets standardised is infrastructure — listings, data, reporting, production process — not the creative or the personality of the room.
How do you handle our GMs?
Carefully, because they hold the relationships and they know their rooms. We set out what is central, what they own, and what they can request — then give them a simple route to ask for support in a soft week. Group marketing fails when it feels like something done to a venue rather than for it.
Can you take over from our existing agencies?
Yes, and we will run a proper handover: accounts, assets, listings, ad accounts and data. Insist that everything is transferred in your ownership, not the outgoing agency's — and if any of it is currently in their name, that is worth fixing regardless of who you hire.
Do you work with mixed hotel and restaurant portfolios?
Yes, and they are common here. We keep the disciplines separate because the metrics and booking windows genuinely differ, then share production, guest data, media negotiation and reporting across them.
What reporting do we get?
One monthly view covering the group and every venue on the same metrics — covers or room nights, revenue, spend, cost per guest, local search position, review profile. Plus a short written read on what changed and what we are moving budget toward.
Can you handle a new venue opening?
Yes, and the group makes it easier — the brand system, production capability and media accounts already exist, so an opening plan can be assembled in weeks rather than built from scratch. Give us six to eight weeks before doors open.
Do you work with franchise groups?
Sometimes. Franchise systems come with brand rules and co-op funds that constrain what is possible locally, so the work concentrates on local search, reviews, community presence and using the co-op budget properly. We will be candid about how much room the system leaves us.
How long is a typical engagement?
Twelve months and up. The consolidation work — systems, listings, data, reporting — takes a quarter before it starts compounding, so anything shorter is paying for the setup and leaving before the return.
Can You Compare Your Venues Today?
If pulling last month's cost per guest for every venue would take more than an afternoon, that is the problem worth solving first. Tell us how many rooms you run and we will show you what the reporting layer looks like.