The Hidden Power of Social
CLIENT
Azerai Hotels
SERVICES
User Research (Landscape Analysis, Guest Personas, Value Proposition), Data Management & Analytics, Content Creation, Social Strategy
It is not enough simply to be present on social media, a hotel that fails to explore the wider power of social leaves money on the table. Recognizing the hidden power of social media, Azerai engaged Advant to professionalize its Social Media Management and Advertising.
Advant applied good data gathering and analysis to uncover an audience Azerai had hitherto overlooked. Advant was able find that audience online; and through paid and organic media, built a highly engaged new follower-base for the hotel, so that when we activated calls to action in key periods, Azeria won significant sales. Indeed, with Advant’s help, Azerai was able to beat its competitor set in awareness and engagement online for the first time.
With proprietary scripting, Advant can scrape and analyze TripAdvisor user data in ways that TripAdvisor doesn’t openly allow. Some of the first data we found suggested an opportunity largely ignored by the brand, whose focus had been on inbound international guests: that is, the domestic Vietnamese audience.
When Advant looked at Azerai and its close competitors, we discovered that Western audiences had been declining for some time; while domestic travelers were increasing at luxury locations such as Aman and Banyan Tree.
We wrote a script for our test set to chart how often in reviews the brand was cited. If a review mentioned the hotel name in a positive light, we indexed it. We found Azerai indexed the lowest, Banyan Tree the highest. Yes, there was an available domestic market, but it wasn’t awareness of the Azerai brand.
Social media is perfect for problems like this because ads can be hyper-targeted, they allow iteration and testing with a small budget, and one is able to operate very systemically provided the creative is well developed and the hotel is well set up on the relevant platform.
Azerai, like many hotels, wasn’t at all optimized with Facebook Ad Manager. As a result, it had little insight into their audiences; their landing pages were not converting and they weren’t being systematic with their social media. We helped clean that up and turned SM into a process that the brand could drive every day, and invest into.
The next step was running targeted social campaigns. We developed some products—an indulgence package, a massage package, a getaway—created a landing page for each, put tracking, creative, and a budget against it, and then ran the campaigns through Facebook ads.
The third step was to loop in a live sales desk. How we monetized through Live Chat is its own case study, but we also used the chat desk to draw qualitative insights from customer engagement, added it to the quantitative data from Facebook ads, and brought it back into our process as a rapid and iterative marketing procedure.
Finally, we invested in an ecosystem of good data capture. With paid SEM. we drove candidates to webpages with audience tracking enabled, using Facebook pixel. We were able to take pixel matching from 4% all the way to 41%. With that quality of matching, we could essentially retarget the very audience that we had identified and shaped.
The results blew through Facebook industry benchmarks. Azerai’s ads were getting really high engagement, high shares and really high messaging. With questions like, ‘How much does this cost?’ ‘Do you have availability?’ each message was a hot lead. We were able to get down to a remarkable $1 per message—a testament to the power of social media well used.