Revenue Generating Campaign
Meritus manages well-known and established hotel brands such as the Mandarin Orchard and Marina Mandarin in Singapore, Meritus Pelangi Beach Resort & Spa in Langkawi, Malaysia. It also manages Meritus Surabaya City Centre in Indonesia, Meritus Shantou and Meritus Mandarin Haikou in China.
Having more properties to manage in 2013, Meritus faced several marketing challenges as the group expanded and had many more rooms to market and manage. The most immediate challenge was finding a cost effective way to increase direct online booking and revenue for all the hotels under its care, and in the process to reduce the reliance of getting bookings via online travel agencies (OTA) and affiliates, in order to increase the margin of per room night sold.
Besides the traditional marketing channels like eDMs and web banner advertising, Meritus group wanted to explore other means that could expand their outreach to the region and also to a wider global target audience. They wanted a performance marketing solution that would guarantee them a clear indication of ROI for every dollar spent. The objective was clear: to get a minimal ROI of 8 by 31 Dec 2013 and close the gap of the number of direct bookers to OTA bookers.
Planning & Execution
Syndacast recommended that Meritus ran a combination of Paid Search (PPC) campaigns together with Display Ad campaigns (with various targeting strategies) to drive targeted performance with minimal advertising wastage.
When it comes to specifically Banner buys—At Syndacast we used our own Demand Side Platform (DSP) solution which we have developed, known as AdBoost. This is a powerful platform which connects to the world’s largest ad exchanges and it gave Meritus access to a large number of individual sites (more than 30 million globally) for the campaign. The key advantages of being on AdBoost were:
•It took away the trouble and hassle of Meritus buying into specific websites individually.
•Campaign management became much more streamlined and effective. We had the ability to optimize Meritus’ campaign across numerous sites based on various targeting techniques according to the campaign objectives on One Single Platform.
•One consolidated reporting. No matter how many sites we ran on, we were able to compile the site performance into one single report. So Meritus need not run through different reports from different website providers.
•Careful selection of whitelist sites. We had also selected and bought into specific websites that fit with the campaign’s target audience and product type.
Below is a key breakdown of the successful targeting strategies we employed for Meritus:
•Retargeting: Retarget the users who have visited the Meritus website but did not convert.
•Prospecting: Combination of different prospecting strategies, including site topic, interest, user behavior, page topic, etc.
•Whitelist: Target lists of domains or websites that have high relevance of content, audience, and proven historical conversion performance.
•Contextual: Target webpages that contain relevant keywords and context.
Effectiveness / Results
Syndacast delivered only performance-driven and result-orientated campaigns for Meritus. Given our proven track record in the hotel and airline industry for consistently delivering ROI of 8 times and above, in 2013, Syndacast launched a unique offering to our travel and hospitality clients-- i.e. if Syndacast agency failed to deliver on its average return on investment of 8 times or more for the Meritus’ online marketing campaign, we won’t charge Meritus any management fee.
For Meritus’ campaign, we generated a total of (May – Dec 2013):
•Hotel Bookings: 7,934
•Average Campaign ROI: 13.94
The staggering ROI of 13.94 we delivered was beyond the minimum expectation set out by the client; they were absolutely delighted with this.