Canada’s tourism sector remains a resilient driver of the hospitality industry. According to Statistics Canada, tourism GDP grew 0.5% in Q1 2025, with food and beverage being one of the main drivers, right behind accommodations.
Yet, behind those numbers is a structural reality that rarely makes headlines: the vast majority of businesses powering that growth are small. Government of Canada data shows that food and beverage services alone account for 66.9% of all tourism SMEs, with most operating on teams of 5 to 99 people.
The question is how hospitality brands are building high-performing marketing functions without large teams. Brands are building smarter and strategically; here’s how.
1. Start With a Marketing Audit
When marketing feels stretched, the instinct is to grow the team. But more often, the real issue is that time, budget, and effort aren’t being allocated effectively.
Before hiring, hospitality brands should audit where their marketing activity actually goes.
Tracking where the team spends its time over two weeks often reveals that a significant portion of effort goes toward reactive tasks:
- Last-minute social posts
- Email campaigns (writing, designing and sending)
- Responding to reviews without a system in place
The 80/20 principle (80% of results stem from 20% of efforts) holds here: a small number of channels and campaigns typically drive the majority of bookings.
A channel attribution audit can provide marketing leaders with the clarity to stop tasks that don’t directly drive revenue or growth and focus on what works. This involves mapping which touchpoints drive direct reservations versus which just create marketing fluff.
2. Turn One-Off Campaigns Into Repeatable Systems
Rebuilding marketing campaigns from scratch every season is another factor that contributes to production declines.
World-class marketing functions benefit from:
- Documented workflows
- Campaign templates
- Content playbooks
This means a holiday gifting promotion gets built once, properly, and then refreshed each year rather than reinvented.
A single photoshoot can produce assets for social, email headers, OTA listings, and the website. Reviews follow a tone guide rather than depending on whoever happens to be working that shift.
Automated tools that assist with initial drafts, scheduling, and reporting have lowered the barrier to this kind of operational leverage, allowing for smaller teams to operate on the same scale as larger marketing teams. Hospitality brands that haven’t yet built these workflows into their day-to-day are leaving capacity on the table.
3. Access Specialist Skills Without Full-Time Costs
Modern marketing involves a network of capabilities. Outsourcing specialist expertise in SEO, paid media, email strategy, or content production enables hospitality brands to leverage those skills without hiring full-time employees.
The model that works is a strong, in-house generalist lead who understands the brand strategy, style, and goals. This single or small team of marketing leads are then supported by specialist partners brought in on a project or retainer basis for execution and technical work.
In practice, this would play out as:
- In-house lead(s) know the property, guest profile, and commercial calendar.
- Specialist(s) bring depth the team doesn’t need every day but absolutely needs when it counts: a paid search rebuild ahead of peak season, a website SEO audit, and a seasonal campaign shoot.
For Canadian properties reaching French-language guests, this model also makes it easier to bring in linguistically and regionally appropriate expertise without committing to permanent overhead.
4. Report Revenue Impact, Not Vanity Metrics
Hospitality brands can’t afford to optimize the wrong numbers. Follower counts and impressions look like activity, but it’s not what ownership will care about.
The shift worth making is from social metrics (clicks, views, sessions) to commercial ones (cost per direct booking, email-driven revenue, direct booking share of total reservations).
A weekly dashboard tracking three to five of these indicators does more for decision-making than a monthly presentation full of charts that don’t connect to profits.
Establishing this early can build the case for marketing’s contribution to the business and create the feedback loop needed to improve.
The Best Hospitality Marketing Teams’ Structure
Headcount has never been the differentiator. Clarity, systems, the right mix of skills, and measurement are. A two-person team with a strong playbook and the right external partnerships can outperform a larger team operating reactively.
The brands that build strong foundations now will be best positioned to scale later, without the overhead of assuming growth requires adding people first. The work is structural. And it’s available to any hospitality brand willing to start.
