Only a bit into 2018, most of us are spending these first weeks of January perfecting our 2018 budget plans and putting them into action. As you allocate your marketing dollars in this new year, be sure to consider these three key strategies to help shape a marketing plan that will positively impact your direct bookings and improve potential guests interactions with your brand online.
Maximize Branded Presence
Consider how potential guests are searching for your hotel on the Internet. Using data sources you have on hand, analyze where users are searching for, and looking at your property. Once you determine that, maximize your presence in these places by allocating the budgets necessary to ensure your marketing dominates said space instead of OTAs or competitors.Screen Pilot adopted this strategy with The Tennessean, a Personal Luxury Hotel for their grand opening campaign.Goal: Ads encouraging a user to book directly with The Tennessean would be present any time any user searched for the brand.Execution: The Screen Pilot team conducted ongoing keyword research to determine maximum possible spend for branded terms and built comprehensive branded PPC campaigns.Results:
- Achieved 100% branded share of voice for The Tennessean in paid search
- Generated a 26:1 ROAS
- 41% of all online revenue in the hotel’s opening month
Practice Smart Retargeting
Of the users who visit your website, how many are new users versus returning? What pages they are visiting? How much time they are spending on your site? Are they completing the goals you have set within say, Google Analytics or Facebook Ads Manager? These are all crucial, data-driven questions to consider when analyzing the effectiveness of your remarketing efforts. When building your digital marketing plan, ensure you have remarketing as a part of your online strategies, and that your data shape how and where you are retargeting potential guests.Here at Screen Pilot, in our display advertising efforts for Gateway Canyons Resort & Spa, we utilize pixel tracking to add users who have visited the resort website to a remarketing list. Once a user visits the Gateway Canyons website, and leaves without making a booking, they are added to a remarketing list to be served our visual banner ads. The ads display brand messaging and promote special offers enticing the user to come back to the website and complete a booking.
By taking a smart approach to retargeting efforts, we have generated:
- 317 visits to the booking engine from the ads
- 41 view-through conversions
- 3 last-click bookings and
- more than 1,100 clicks on ads in 12 months
Build New, Relevant Audiences
A hotelier should strongly reconsider any strategy that omits brand awareness tactics from a digital marketing plan. The far too common error of allocating all digital dollars to bottom-line, ROI-generating channels fails to consider that production cannot continue if new audiences are not exposed to your brand, in addition to your current and returning guests. This is where data really comes into play.To devise the best brand awareness plan for your property, look into trends and data that tell a story of how new users are finding your brand and competitors. Look into utilizing lookalike audiences of your current guests. Create or leverage powerful and eye-catching content to attract potential guests to engage with your brand. In doing so, you will not only build awareness for your brand but do so in a way that creates long-lasting, qualified audiences for your product.One of the strategies we use to build relevant audiences and brand awareness for our clients at Screen Pilot is through Facebook PPC ads. For Hotel Zoe San Francisco, showcasing their new brand to the right target audience was integral in establishing success for their property and building the right guest base.[video width="428" height="688" mp4="https://screenpilot.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HZOE-Jan18-Brand-Canvas.mp4" loop="true" autoplay="true" preload="auto"][/video]First: We created dynamic Facebook ads that boasted beautiful image and video assetsThen: We added targeting to "lookalike audiences" of their remarketing listsNext: We layered them with additional interest, age, geographic, and income targeting to introduce the right people to ZoeFinally: Our campaigns resulted in over 10,516 sessions to the website in a 6-month timeframe (6% of overall sessions to the website), and 858 users sent to the booking engineBonus: This gave us the ability to include these new, relevant audiences in remarketing lists for future marketing efforts!We know there are so many factors that go into planning a marketing budget. Data should not only be one of the factors considered in building your budget but a driving force in crafting your budget strategy. By leveraging data as the building blocks of your strategic choices in allocating your marketing dollars, you will set your property up for a successful and productive new year.
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Only a bit into 2018, most of us are spending these first weeks of January perfecting our 2018 budget plans and putting them into action. As you allocate your marketing dollars in this new year, be sure to consider these three key strategies to help shape a marketing plan that will positively impact your direct bookings and improve potential guests interactions with your brand online.
Maximize Branded Presence
Consider how potential guests are searching for your hotel on the Internet. Using data sources you have on hand, analyze where users are searching for, and looking at your property. Once you determine that, maximize your presence in these places by allocating the budgets necessary to ensure your marketing dominates said space instead of OTAs or competitors.Screen Pilot adopted this strategy with The Tennessean, a Personal Luxury Hotel for their grand opening campaign.Goal: Ads encouraging a user to book directly with The Tennessean would be present any time any user searched for the brand.Execution: The Screen Pilot team conducted ongoing keyword research to determine maximum possible spend for branded terms and built comprehensive branded PPC campaigns.Results:
- Achieved 100% branded share of voice for The Tennessean in paid search
- Generated a 26:1 ROAS
- 41% of all online revenue in the hotel’s opening month
Practice Smart Retargeting
Of the users who visit your website, how many are new users versus returning? What pages they are visiting? How much time they are spending on your site? Are they completing the goals you have set within say, Google Analytics or Facebook Ads Manager? These are all crucial, data-driven questions to consider when analyzing the effectiveness of your remarketing efforts. When building your digital marketing plan, ensure you have remarketing as a part of your online strategies, and that your data shape how and where you are retargeting potential guests.Here at Screen Pilot, in our display advertising efforts for Gateway Canyons Resort & Spa, we utilize pixel tracking to add users who have visited the resort website to a remarketing list. Once a user visits the Gateway Canyons website, and leaves without making a booking, they are added to a remarketing list to be served our visual banner ads. The ads display brand messaging and promote special offers enticing the user to come back to the website and complete a booking.
By taking a smart approach to retargeting efforts, we have generated:
- 317 visits to the booking engine from the ads
- 41 view-through conversions
- 3 last-click bookings and
- more than 1,100 clicks on ads in 12 months
Build New, Relevant Audiences
A hotelier should strongly reconsider any strategy that omits brand awareness tactics from a digital marketing plan. The far too common error of allocating all digital dollars to bottom-line, ROI-generating channels fails to consider that production cannot continue if new audiences are not exposed to your brand, in addition to your current and returning guests. This is where data really comes into play.To devise the best brand awareness plan for your property, look into trends and data that tell a story of how new users are finding your brand and competitors. Look into utilizing lookalike audiences of your current guests. Create or leverage powerful and eye-catching content to attract potential guests to engage with your brand. In doing so, you will not only build awareness for your brand but do so in a way that creates long-lasting, qualified audiences for your product.One of the strategies we use to build relevant audiences and brand awareness for our clients at Screen Pilot is through Facebook PPC ads. For Hotel Zoe San Francisco, showcasing their new brand to the right target audience was integral in establishing success for their property and building the right guest base.[video width="428" height="688" mp4="https://screenpilot.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HZOE-Jan18-Brand-Canvas.mp4" loop="true" autoplay="true" preload="auto"][/video]First: We created dynamic Facebook ads that boasted beautiful image and video assetsThen: We added targeting to "lookalike audiences" of their remarketing listsNext: We layered them with additional interest, age, geographic, and income targeting to introduce the right people to ZoeFinally: Our campaigns resulted in over 10,516 sessions to the website in a 6-month timeframe (6% of overall sessions to the website), and 858 users sent to the booking engineBonus: This gave us the ability to include these new, relevant audiences in remarketing lists for future marketing efforts!We know there are so many factors that go into planning a marketing budget. Data should not only be one of the factors considered in building your budget but a driving force in crafting your budget strategy. By leveraging data as the building blocks of your strategic choices in allocating your marketing dollars, you will set your property up for a successful and productive new year.
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