Syte Marketing Case Study – The Capital Hotel and Apartments

Our methodology was complex but our goal was simple; bring in as many direct bookings to the Capital Hotel’s website as possible.

We did this by:

1. Focusing on conversion rates and the inherent “multiple touch” approach required in the hotel booking industry
2. Understanding the role of OTA’s (Online Travel Agencies) and how to compete with companies with unlimited budgets
3. Bringing in the right traffic at the right time (after they had been educated by the other hotel chains and booking engines)

Google Campaigns:

Booking a hotel is very much a “multiple touch” type transaction; consumers do a fortune or research into rates, availability and add-ons in the hotel industry before they part with their money.

For this reason, the use of audiences in our Google campaigns was crucial. Bidding on “Sandton Hotels” was only effective once the user had shown some interest in booking hotels beforehand. It’s just too expensive of a campaign to run, to bid on keywords that would acquire the user through every part of the buyers funnel. We needed to be very strategic in not only the keywords we bid on but when we bid on them.

The typical transactor visits a single hotel website at least 3 times before purchasing.

Facebook Campaigns:

We built audiences based on:

• Remarketing lists (people that had reached at least the booking engine)
• Remarketing Lookalikes
• Past customer lists and lookalikes
• Cart Abandoners
• Using Facebooks interest group of “frequent travellers”

We then crafted Ads to speak to each one of these audiences and used dynamic ads to convert these audiences. We were able to reach a ROAS (return of ad spend) of 12x

Conversion Optimization:

Conversion optimization is crucial in any hotel site. Cart abandoners are always a challenge but this is even more so when you are dealing with:

1. Limited Stock (hotels being booked out)
2. Price variance and competition (mainly from the OTA’s)
3. Direct competition from competing hotels

Because of the cost required to get someone to the website we needed to ensure as much of this traffic was converting!

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is often an untapped space for hotels. People assume it is too expensive to market on but we can get a very acceptable ROAS using smart audiences and attractive offers

We are dealing with tight margins in the hotel space and therefore we needed to get massive returns to ensure our campaign worked. We were able to get the following ROAS:

Facebook – 1:12 (for every R1 spent we were able to achieve R12 in revenue)

Google – 1:7

LinkedIn – 1:7

E-mail is still one of the most powerful tools for any eCommerce or hotel site.

Mass emails to an uncleaned list are not effective at all but well-timed emails to an engaged list (past customers and current prospects) proved to be very effective!