SITUATION:
Choice Hotels International was interested in increasing the effectiveness of their regional media planning and buying, so they partnered with MMGY Global to oversee their co-op digital online marketing program starting in 2010. This assignment covers 13 U.S. co-op regions for 11 individual Choice hotel brands and includes over 4,200 participating hotels.
The co-op marketing program uses online banner advertising to target leisure and business travelers with the following demographics: 48%/52% Male/Female, age 24-64, $48,000-$128,000 HHI Range, 38% Graduated College (or more), 82% are Presently Married, 74% Have Children in HH.
ACTION:
MMGY began by meeting with each of the co-op leaders for all 13 regions and reviewing their past marketing plans. Based on this input, MMGY Global crafted individual digital marketing plans specifically tailored to drive revenue via the co-op landing pages to benefit the hotels in the region.
We worked with the Choice website development team to enable MMGY Global to track conversions and revenue generated from our digital campaigns based on tags implemented on the reservation confirmation page of the ChoiceHotels.com website. Additionally, all ads are tagged using Adobe Audience Manager, which enables the Choice Business Intelligence team to measure the true incremental revenue generated by the program using an attribution modeling approach.
On a weekly and monthly basis, MMGY Global reviews the performance of the individual sites on all 13 of the regional plans to evaluate the conversion rate and optimize the media placements.
Sites are added and deleted from the plans based on actual performance data and ongoing testing of new digital marketing partners. As the program continues to evolve we have extended it to include targeting Canadian travelers as well as combining some of the regions into “Super Regions” to broaden the reach – in addition to the more targeted local, state and regional plans.
Regional banner ads have been developed using the national brand promotions or programs that do not include rate discounting – based on Choice’s revenue management and rate parity strategy.
RESULTS:
Each year since Choice began partnering with MMGY Global, we have been able to continuously refine the program to provide a better ROI. In 2013, the ROI was $5.68 for every $1 of marketing spend. The ROI has steadily increased and is now at $12.97 – an increase of 128 percent in the last six years. This ROI translated to over $50 million in incremental revenue generated by the co-op program.