Pace-driven marketing: spend where the gap is

Monday morning. Esther, the marketing manager at Hotel Peaqplus City, is putting together the January campaign plan. The budget is set: 4,000 EUR of marketing spend for the month. The reflex she’s followed for years is simple and feels fair: split it evenly. Four weeks, 1,000 EUR each, with a “Discover the winter city” campaign running throughout. Tidy, predictable, everyone happy.

Then she remembers what Daniel said at the last revenue meeting: “January isn’t even. We have two weeks where the rooms will echo empty, and one week where we’ll be full anyway because of a conference.”

Esther freezes with the cursor over the “approve” button. If January isn’t even, then why is her marketing spend even? If the house fills anyway one week, then the 1,000 EUR spent on that week brings guests who would have come regardless — pure waste. Meanwhile the other two weeks, where there’s a real gap, get only 1,000 EUR each, when that’s exactly where the most is needed.

This lesson is about the most important principle of data-driven marketing: the budget goes not to the month but to the dates with a gap.

Marketing’s job is to fill the gap, not to “prop up” traffic

Traditional marketing thinks in the month or the season: “January campaign,” “summer campaign.” The trouble is that a month is not a single demand situation. The same January can hold a hollow, empty post-holiday week and a week sold out because of a conference — and the right marketing move for each is exactly opposite.

Pace (booking pace) — which we walked through with a leader’s eye in lesson 10 — is the data that shows this: it tells you not whether we’re full NOW, but at what rate bookings are accumulating for a future date versus where we should be. A date can be “lagging” (fewer bookings than usual this far out) or “running ahead” (more than there usually is by this point).

From this follow the two golden rules of pace-driven marketing:

• Don’t spend on the days that fill on their own. If a date’s pace is strong, the demand is already there — marketing only “brings in” guests who would have booked anyway. Worse, it brings them in through a cheaper channel or with a discount, for less than they’d have come on their own. Here the move isn’t to spend, but to raise the rate.
• Do spend on the weak-pace days. Where bookings are lagging, there’s a real gap that marketing can fill — and every booking brought in is new revenue, not the kind that would have arrived by itself.

So marketing doesn’t “prop up” the month in general — it fills the gaps with surgical precision.

A worked example: a January pace map

Let’s look at Hotel Peaqplus City’s January broken down by week. The pace data shows, for each week, the current OTB (on the books) occupancy against where the budget says we should be by now.

Under the even plan, all four weeks would have got 1,000 EUR. But the pace map says otherwise:

• Week 4 already sits at 79%, well above target, because of a conference. Not a single euro of marketing is needed here — in fact, the right move is to raise the BAR (Best Available Rate — the public, standard rate), say from 105 to 120 EUR on the remaining rooms. The 1,000 EUR meant for it is saved and reallocated.
• Week 2 is on target and needs no intervention. The 1,000 EUR meant for it is freed up too.
• That leaves the real problem: weeks 1 and 3, both badly lagging. The full 4,000 EUR goes here — 2,000 EUR per week instead of the scattered 1,000.

Let’s see what this is worth in week 3. The week’s capacity is 80 rooms × 7 nights = 560 room nights. The current 41% means ~230 room nights sold; the 60% target ~336. So the gap is about 106 room nights. If the targeted 2,000 EUR spend fills even half of it — 53 room nights at 85 EUR — that’s 53 × 85 = 4,505 EUR of new revenue, from a single week, from a single campaign. The cost of the entire January budget comes back from just half of week 3.

Add to this the spend saved in week 4 and the rate increase (15 EUR more on the ~17 remaining unsold rooms: ~17 × 15 = 255 EUR of extra revenue per night, with no marketing cost), and the pace-driven plan not only targets better — it brings more from less.

The catch: marketing likes to be even

Why doesn’t everyone do it this way? Because the even plan is more comfortable: easier to plan, easier to account for, and it doesn’t require watching the pace daily. Pace-driven marketing, by contrast, breathes with demand — if a so-far-weak week suddenly pulls in bookings, you have to reallocate away from it too; if a group cancels off a strong week, that week suddenly needs budget.

For this, it’s not enough for marketing to glance at the numbers once a quarter. Peaqplus Pickup flags negative pickup (a drop in occupancy, a fall-off from cancellations) and pace lag, while the Insight Engine highlights the future dates showing an anomaly — so marketing sees exactly where a gap has opened before it’s too late to fill. This way the budget moves by demand, not by the calendar. Recognising pace anomalies and timing demand-driven action from the revenue side is covered in the RM Academy lessons Marketing and RM in concert and Promotional strategy — pace reading and promotion timing in the system.

Back to Esther

Esther lifts the cursor off the “approve” button and rewrites the plan. Instead of the even four-times-1,000, the full 4,000 EUR goes to weeks 1 and 3, with targeted last-minute and “long weekend in the city” offers aimed precisely at the lagging dates. She doesn’t advertise week 4 — instead she tells Daniel there’s room to raise rates during the conference week.

At the end of the month the numbers bear her out: weeks 1 and 3 catch up to target, week 4 brings even more at the higher rate, and revenue per marketing euro (the classic ROAS logic) is better than in any prior January — because she spent not a single euro where the house would have been full anyway. That’s the essence of pace-driven marketing: not to spend more, but to spend where the gap actually is.

Key takeaways

• The budget goes not to the month but to the dates with a gap. A month is not a single demand situation — the same January holds both a hollow week and a sold-out one.
• Don’t spend on the days that fill on their own (the demand is already there → raise the rate); do spend on the weak-pace days (there, marketing brings new revenue).
• The even split is comfortable but wasteful: in the example, the 1,000 EUR meant for week 4 would have brought guests who were coming anyway because of the conference.
• The pace map shows where the gap is: in the example, weeks 1 and 3, lagging by −17 and −19 pp, get the full budget, and filling even half of week 3 already brings back the whole month’s spend.
• Pace-driven marketing breathes with demand — it calls for continuous watching, not quarterly.