Audience-First Approach Defines 2022 Planning Season
*Award-winning Case Study
By utilizing audience signals mapped to a smart channel strategy, Net Conversion increased brand engagement in addition to overall revenue and ROAS for multi location travel client.
Situation
Our multi location travel client is the leader in luxury all-inclusive oceanfront resorts in the Caribbean, Jamaica, and Mexico, with world-class spas, restaurants, and more.
In 2020 most hotel and resorts went completely dark with their paid media efforts, however our travel client paused their mid and upper-funnel efforts, while maintaining their lower-funnel tactics reaching consumers looking to book while competing with OTAs.
As we moved into 2021, our client wanted to begin generating demand again from qualified audiences, in addition to the demand capture they had previously established. This meant an expansion in media efforts to include mid and upper funnel tactics.
Objective
- To achieve our clients objective, we had to ensure that we were reaching qualified, converting audiences. Although overall competition was lessened due to the pandemic, we still set a high goal of maintaining a pre-pandemic level of revenue and +20% ROAS from lower-funnel tactics.
Implementation
Qualified travelers were identified and targeted using our Audience-First approach. With our personalized and data-driven approach, we began to identify the signals and segments that make up the ideal target audience segments. Identifying the actions, interests, and behaviors of a consumer in conjunction with signals based on the consumer’s behavior and characteristics – we were able to define strategic data-based audience segments for our client.
To generate interest and intent across all properties, we needed to expand outside of solely lower-funnel metasearch tactics to include full-funnel video & display to our strategy. Through bidding strategy testing, we ensured that our re-launch of full-funnel tactics were as efficient as possible to reach our goals while maintaining a high share of voice across all channels.
Our new full-funnel marketing strategy consisted of:
- Brand Search
- General Category – All inclusive hotels in [location], luxury hotels in [location], vacation/getaways in [location]
- Display Remarketing
- Display Prospecting for specific locations only
- Metasearch
- Video only for specific resort locations only
Results
By utilizing audience signals mapped to a smart channel strategy, Our multi location travel client’s brand engagement increased in addition to overall revenue and ROAS. Our Audience-First approach was able to define top indexing audiences based on overall performance, setting us for a successful 2022 planning season.
Overall 2021 performance crushed it, out-pacing 2019 by more than double in all channels composing of Paid Media Revenue. We continue to see strong efficient increases in ROAS despite increased spend.
+106%
Revenue vs. 2019
+60%
ROAS vs. 2019
