Integrated marketing strategy realization

History

In the spring of 2021, we were approached by business owners who were opening a new apartment complex in Zatoka, Odessa region. The hot season was starting in a month, so they needed to plan and implement marketing activities to maximise the hotel’s summer occupancy.

About the project

VITA PRIVATA is a complex of apartments in Zatoka on the first line by the sea.While the owners were completing the rooms, we prepared to quickly start promotion after the completion of construction. Website: vitaprivata.com.ua.

In this project, we used not only traditional marketing tools (SMM, targeted advertising, contextual advertising, etc.), but also connected niche channels for attracting clients: travel aggregators booking.com, airbnb.com, hotel reviews service tripadviser.com. In addition, we were required to set up a CRM to manage the room stock of the apartment complex.

Goals

  1. Registration in travel aggregators
  2. Supervising the creation of a website
  3. Setting up CRM and combining it with all sources of lead generation.
  4. Ensuring occupancy rate of the apartments at the level of 80%, starting from the second month of the active advertising campaign.

Strategy

Due to the short timeframe and the client’s wishes, we were not able to implement a full-fledged marketing strategy: from researching the target audience to implementing the marketing activity plan. However, despite such a framework, we still approached the project comprehensively.

A superficial analysis of competitors showed that the level of apartments corresponds to the audience segments “medium” and “medium +”. This means that the communication should emphasise not on the low price, but on other value characteristics:

– proximity to the sea;

– fresh rooms;

– modern design;

– customer-oriented approach in service (in Zatoka this is really a problem).

Цілі, поставлені клієнтом, мали на увазі швидке забезпечення завантаження всіх номерів. Виходячи з цього, ми вибрали інструменти, які здатні дати найшвидший результат:

  • таргетована реклама у соціальних мережах;
  • присутність на туристичних агрегаторах;
  • контекстна реклама у Google.

The latter already have a great weight in search engines and are well optimised, so it is inexpedient to bypass them in organic rendition for highly competitive queries, and in a short period of time. Let’s consider the implementation of this strategy below.

What was done

Website creation

Another agency was responsible for design and layout, but we supervised their work. Our agency created text content, photo and video materials, performed SEO-optimisation of the site, implemented CRM-system and booking module on the site. The result can be seen on the current website: vitaprivata.com.ua. We will consider the first points in more detail further on, but let’s stop on SEO.

The site is developed on the platform readymag.com. This is an analogue of Tilda. The choice in favour of this editor was made, again, because of the tight deadlines. Since, programming even with WordPress would have taken much longer.

This severely limited us in SEO-optimisation, however, despite this, we were offered the following items on site improvements, each of which was written a separate TOR:


1.Technical optimisation of the site

  1.1. robots.txt file

  1.2. Noindex, Nofollow tags

  1.3. XML sitemap

  1.4.  HTML sitemap

  1.5.  Site structure

  1.6.  URL structure and format

  1.7. 404 error page

  1.8. Image Optimisation

  1.9. Breadcrumbs

  1.10.  Language versions

  1.11.  “rel-canonical” attribute

  1.12. Micropropagation

  1.13.  PageSpeed Insights metrics


2. Content

   2.1. Metadata

   2.2. Page Text Content

   2.3. Blog


3.  Link profile


4. Basic usability analysis

   4.1. First screen

   4.2. Large indents

   4.3. Call button

   4.4. Social network buttons

   4.5. Online chat

   4.6. Call button

4.7.  Contacts and map

Some of these suggestions were successfully implemented, others were postponed due to platform limitations.

Conducting photo shoots and shooting promotional videos

For use on the website, travel aggregators, social networks and advertising we needed visual content: photos of rooms, surrounding area, happy customers etc.

The task was successfully accomplished. A few photos will be presented below, the rest can be viewed in the project’s social networks or on the website.



A short promotional video was also shot using the drone:

CRM customisation

A specialised CRM for travel business Travelline travelline.ru was chosen.

The most important function of this system is room booking management. The system integrates with booking.com, airbnb.com and avoids overbooking. Apartment owners have avoided situations when a client books a room through the services and it turns out that there are no rooms available for those dates.

It looks like this:

All advance bookings are automatically entered into this table from the website, booking.com and airbnb.com. We will not tell you about all the features of this CRM in the case study, if you are interested – read about the functionality on their website.

Registering accounts with travel aggregators

We chose booking.com and airbnb.com as the most common in our country. The registration procedure is quite labour-intensive and long, so it is worth starting about three weeks in advance. Difficulties were caused by the fact that the rooms were still in the final stages of renovation, and without photos and videos of the rooms, it is impossible to verify the accounts. and video of the numbers, you can’t verify the account. This is due to the concern for the end customer, so that the information provided on the sites is completely accurate, i.e. you cannot upload one photo and then replace it with another – in that case you will have to go through the procedure again.

Airbnb handles all payments through itself, charging a 15% commission to the apartment owner at 15%. Booking simply books the room for the new account, and you negotiate the payment method directly with the guest. Despite this, you then pay Booking a commission for successful bookings. Including all payments, it’s about the same 15%. As the credibility of the account grows, you will be able to link payment methods online through the site’s functionality.

When the accounts were verified and received the first positive feedback, we began to receive requests in approximately this ratio:

– Airbnb — 20%

– Booking — 30%

– Contextual advertising — 30%

– Targeted advertising — 10%

– Other types of advertising — 10%

Hence, it follows that you can not ignore these travel aggregators, because with a minimum of effort, they provide, as an example of our case, a total of about 50% of applications.

Setting up contextual advertising

We launched two search advertising campaigns:

1. Odessa.

2. Ukraine minus Odessa.

As we can see, these campaigns show almost equal effectiveness. They include the most targeted keywords: “apartments in Zatoka” and similar to the basic query “room in Zatoka”, “hotel in Zatoka”, “holiday centre in Zatoka”, etc. to expand the coverage.

in Zatoka”, “hotel in Zatoka”, “holiday centre in Zatoka”, etc. to expand the coverage. After analysing the requests of potential clients, we changed the texts of the ads and removed groups with the word “swimming pool” in order to exclude non targeted displays and save the budget.

We did this because a large number of bounce rates were related to specific requirements for the pool. We decided to simply cut off this audience at the click stage. As the results showed, we succeeded – such refusals practically disappeared. We began to use the advertising budget more effectively and not waste it on showing to non targeted audiences. This emphasises the importance of an integrated approach, when marketing controls the situation from the first click on an ad to the successful completion of the campaign.

Within a limited budget, it’s important not to miss ad impressions at ‘hot times’.

To do this, we analysed the timing of conversions (calls and online bookings), identified patterns and optimised the ad schedule to match them. This allowed us to get more impressions and targeted actions in the right period.

At the time the advert was launched, there were only a few branded enquiries in the search. This is logical – the apartments are new and nobody knows them. With the growth of other activities, especially work with bloggers, there was an increase in branded queries. Therefore, the decision was made to launch a branded advertising campaign.

In less than two weeks, we saw an increase in branded traffic and audience interest in the company, as well as a significant number of leads compared to other campaigns. Branded traffic has traditionally yielded several times higher conversion rates (see the screenshot above).

This emphasises the importance of multi-channel interaction on the user: people saw a video from a blogger, went to see hotel reviews on booking.com or airbnb.com, and then came to the site to book a room.

Setting up targeted advertising

We launched 2 ad campaigns:

  1. On Facebook platform.
  2. On Instagram platform.

They were divided regionally into 2 groups of adverts: West and East of Ukraine.

As it is known, the Ukrainian language prevails in the West, so the advertising creatives

and texts were adapted for this part of the audience. A similar situation with the eastern regions, whose residents are used to seeing information in the Russian language.

As we can see, the campaign on Facebook was more effective. The conversion price here at the first launch was $0.25, while on Instagram a conversion cost $0.37.

Ads on Facebook were significantly more clickable at all launches (average CTR of Facebook campaigns — 4.68%, Instagram — 2.05%).

If we talk about ad groups, the best performance is tracked for groups on Western Ukraine. For example, in the Facebook campaign at the first launch, 60% of conversions came from the West. Thus, the cost of conversion here in this group was $0.25, while in the eastern group it was $0.37.

The decision to change the ads that include the word “pool” (in order to filter out non targeted conversions) also affected targeting. All creatives, picture text and description were changed to reflect this observation. The results of the new launch met expectations: the conversion price was halved.

With the third launch we also optimised the ad display schedule, excluding weekends, which allowed us to use the advertising budget even more rationally.

In the creatives we used for the adverts, it was important to emphasise all the advantages of the apartments. In addition to the textual presentation, we also selected bright visualisation, which allowed us to create a complex image for potential guests about the holiday that awaits them in the apartments. Both standard media files and carousels were launched.

During a month of advertising activity we received 1022 conversions at a price of $0.19. The average CTR for the campaigns was 3.18%. In addition, the adverts collected 14 reposts and 60 saves, which allowed us to get conversions even after stopping the adverts.

SMM

We created business card accounts on social networks (Facebook, Instagram), in the description we highlighted the advantages: the first line by the sea, a large beach, restaurant on the territory, new rooms with good repair. Also in the head of the profile there is a phone number and an active link to the site, by which the guest can book a room.

In order to easily find answers to all questions of interest “Reviews”, “Price”, “Room Photos”, “How to book?”, “Address”.

After completing the profiles, we connected the work with bloggers as an element of a long-term strategy to promote the apartments on the Internet. We selected macro influencers for cooperation on barter, with different target audience and number of subscribers from 60 to 100 thousand.

TOR for bloggers (here we will describe briefly): quality content, room-tour, native storytelling about key advantages and competitive advantages. We, in turn, increased the coverage by making reposts, all content from bloggers is used in social networks. After a month of close work with bloggers, the statistics increased by such indicators:

  • covered accounts 32.3 thousand (+191%);
  • 1053 content interactions (+201%);
  • + 310 subscribers;
  • more than 50 direct requests for detailed information about the apartment.

Working with reviews

As we all know, an important factor in choosing a holiday destination is having positive reviews. In the beginning we don’t have reviews – people are afraid to trust a new hotel – reviews don’t appear. It’s a vicious circle.

That’s why at first we persuaded the owners to offer free accommodation in exchange for a review. And there were no requirements for reviews and a person could write it completely objectively.

So we got the first ratings on Google Maps, Airbnb, Booking, and this, in the end, led to a significant increase in submissions from all channels.

In addition, the receptionist was instructed to ask everyone who checked out to leave a review about the apartment. Additionally, a sign was created on the reception desk with handy links to various services.

Result

As a result of the work of all marketing tools described above, we received 71.67% room occupancy in the first month of our active work in July. And in the second month it was already 92.01%.

Unfortunately, earlier we could not launch due to unavailability of rooms, so two months of the tourist season were lost. However, by launching all activities in a short period of time, we were able to get quite a good result in our opinion, which was possible due to the integrated use of tools.