HTS Management Holdings (HTS) owns and manages the Lane End Conference Centre near Marlow in Buckinghamshire. The Centre is a purpose built residential conference and training venue with 104 bedrooms set in 26 acres of landscaped grounds.

The ‘meeting venue’ market in the UK is highly competitive and considered to be oversupplied by a mix of hotels, converted country-houses and purpose built facilities.

HTS were wrestling with how best to differentiate their facility in order to attract the corporate clients that they targeted, when they decided to seek expert marketing support. EBS Marketing were approached and asked to propose a positioning strategy as well as a marketing programme to turn that into reality.

Impressed

“We were impressed with EBS Marketing straight away,” said Teruko Iwanaga, Deputy Chairman, HTS Management Holdings. “The consultant, Neil Brooks, understood our issues very quickly and proposed an approach that made good sense whilst fitting in well with our capabilities and budgets.”

The resulting marketing strategy started by renaming the venue from HTS Lane End to Lane End Conference Centre along with the delivery of all of the associated re-branding.

A major programme of photography was then undertaken during the summer months to ‘show off’ the venue at its best, resulting in the creation of a sumptuous 24 page brochure and a wholly new website featuring an innovative self-navigable ‘virtual tour’ of the Centre’s buildings and grounds.

To complement the new website, an online marketing campaign was set up resulting in an increase in web visitors by orders of magnitude accompanied by a dramatic rise in sales enquiries. In parallel, a telemarketing campaign was run targeting large corporates, local companies and venue-booking agencies. This too generated significant sales enquires and bookings.

Professional and open

“The proposed marketing plan was more complex than anything we had tackled in the past,” continued Teruko. “However, Neil managed the project in a very professional and open way, so that we were clear what was happening at every stage and were always making decisions in an informed way. It turned out to be much easier than I had expected.”

Once everything was set up and running smoothly, EBS Marketing handed over all of the key materials to HTS and trained selected staff in their usage and upkeep.

“The results of the EBS Marketing approach are plain for all to see,” concluded Teruko. “We have a much clearer market position, much better marketing materials and much higher levels of sales enquires and bookings. It was a job well done and it taught us a great deal that we can use ourselves in the future. I would be very happy to recommend EBS Marketing to any other business looking to improve the value that they get from their marketing spend … except for one of our competitors, of course!”

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