Regional Accommodation Provider

Case Study.

0 %

increase in direct bookings via their website

0

leads generated from Facebook Campaigns

0

impressions made from Facebook ads alone

The Challenge

This accommodation provider came to us after the Kangaroo Island December – January bushfires in 2019. 

They had lost over 90% of their occupancy and desperately needed to recover.

The South Australian Tourism Commission referred them to us; in hopes that we could help attract them some new business.

Our initial goal was to drive traffic to the website and encourage people to tour Kangaroo Island and help the struggling business. Another goal was to educate people about booking directly using the website.

Recently, we’ve also had to navigate the major challenges presented by COVID.

The Digital Advertising Solution

We worked closely with the South Australian Tourism Commission and built up the campaigns based on their resources and slogans. 

We opted to use a combination of Google and Facebook advertising to achieve the main goals of driving traffic to the website and converting them into bookings. Facebook was focused on promoting the packages while the Google ads were aimed at generating general bookings.

While trying to recover from the bushfires, COVID then hit, shutting borders interstate and internationally. With uncertainty lingering in the air, it forced us to pivot and rethink the strategy and ad copy.

The Results

Through the creation of detailed target audiences on Facebook and Google, we managed a 150% increase in traffic and engagement compared to previous years.

One of our goals was to educate people about booking directly using the website.
In order to achieve this, we improved the website and the Call To Action.
 
After two years, we had over 1611% increase in direct bookings via the website compared to 2018-2019. Our idea to utilise a strategic combination of Google and Facebook ads proved to be effective.
 
To tackle the second major challenge of COVID, we opted to be pro-active and didn’t stop the ads during the lockdown period. Instead, we worked on campaigns that focused on “Save this for later” or “register your interest now and travelling later” using Facebook Lead generation form. As a result, we had generated over 500 leads. These users were then added to the mailing list and received offers in the upcoming months when the borders reopened.
 
The key success for this client was that we were pro-active and always updated the ads and campaigns; revisiting the strategy as COVID cases and border rules changed. This helped this accommodation provider to keep on top of bookings and never have a significant loss during the past 2 years.