Background
Macdonald Hotels is the UK's eighth largest hotel and leisure group, operating over 100 hotels and resorts throughout the UK and Spain, with over 7000 bedrooms, a combined turnover in excess of £250m and employing over 6000 people.
Last summer, Macdonald Hotels introduced an online booking service for the first time and launched its re-designed website, with the aim of generating a significant new income stream for its business.
Tino Nombro, Managing Director of Ambergreen comments: "We were singled out by Macdonald Hotels because we had the specialism and experience needed to develop a business model and define a strategy that would support that model. Search marketing is a complex field, requiring professional skills and knowledge. Over a number of years we have developed the techniques and partnerships essential to create sophisticated campaigns that meet business objectives and deliver high returns on investment."
Campaign Aims
Macdonald Hotels wanted a tailored online business model that would determine the key ratios for online trading and in parallel, generate the best possible return on investment.
The principal aims were to generate a new income stream and ensure that Macdonald Hotels succeeded in a fiercely competitive market, by increasing the volume of qualified traffic to its site and the consequent conversion rate of visitors to room bookings.
Online Execution
At the outset, Ambergreen defined the business strategy and implemented a highly targeted UK search marketing campaign.
The strategy was created to focus on the short break market surrounding the 96 Macdonald Hotels UK locations. The strategy initially consisted of two phases. Firstly, Ambergreen conducted an intensive analysis of the complex hotel market, drilling down to identify the primary targets for activity and the elements that would shape the campaign and ensure Macdonald Hotels achieved its aims.
This scrutiny established the size of the market, the potential return on investment and the 17,000 critical key words and phrases, including common mis-spellings, which would deliver the maximum return on investment for Macdonald Hotels.
Additionally, Ambergreen evaluated the architecture and content of the Macdonald Hotels website to optimise it for the search engines. With over fifty areas of a website adding or detracting to its final search ranking, website architecture is the crucial starting point for the success of a site and search engine optimisation techniques are often overlooked or misunderstood by web designers.
A decision to run a pilot campaign across selected pay per click engines (including E-Spotting and Overture) was driven by Ambergreen's expert understanding of 'search' as a market and as a tool. The company created a unique mix of techniques and monitored those closely over a six week period, maintaining the maximum return on investment and generating the critical ratio data needed to roll out the campaign.
The results of the first phase were extremely strong and verified the business model on which the strategy was built. This led Ambergreen to expand the pay per click campaign tactically to an increased number of engines including BT Looksmart and Google, giving Macdonald Hotels the best possible coverage within the UK search market.
The account continues to be run from Ambergreen’s headquarters in Edinburgh, headed up by Grant Whiteside, one of Europe’s leading SEO specialists. Ambergreen is pioneering search engine marketing as the key to successful search marketing and occupies a unique position in the market because of its track record, technical expertise and commitment to ethical marketing.
Results
Since launch Ambergreen has maintained a sixfold increase in weekly traffic to Macdonald Hotels.
With a solid return on investment of 29:1 the campaign has extended to encompass seasonal variations and Macdonald Hotels continues to receive £29 back for every £1 spent with Ambergreen.
Due to the nature of the travel industry where many travel sites get high levels of unique users but low conversion ratios, Ambergreen's unique approach has been to generate highly targeted traffic at a cost that suits the business, therefore maintaining a good conversion ratio and strong sales.
During the second phase, the campaign saw a significant up turn in traffic as it moved to additional engines, becoming potentially visible to over 90% of the UK audience.
Ambergreen has continuously built on the first phase and maintained a steady growth in traffic and return on investment and is now embarked on new campaigns to target the Christmas and New Year break market.
The Last Word
Derek Leslie, Business Change Director of Macdonald Hotels adds: “We believed that the internet could open up a significant new channel to market for Macdonald Hotels and initial revenue projections were strong. Ambergreen has actually exceeded those projections and generated significantly higher values. The return on investment has been impressive and search marketing has proved itself to be one of the most transparent, measurable and successful forms of marketing we currently employ.
"If I was to offer any company advice for how to succeed online – it would be to find the right search marketing partner who keeps everything transparent and helps you reach your objectives."
