CASE STUDY

LUXURY COTSWOLD RETREATS

Provided a Strong Ads Funnel and an effective Average Cost Per Booking

BACKGROUND

The sister brand of Cotswold Grey. After seeing a lot of success with the shop and truly understanding his audience and the local area, Simon built a portfolio of luxury holiday-lets in the Cotswolds.

Luxury Cotswold Retreats wanted to move away from a total reliance on booking platforms such as AirBnB and Boutique Retreats that take large commissions from bookings.

They needed to develop an alternative advertising channel to secure bookings directly from customers to increase profits that they get from each booking. It was important that the activity was fully owned by the brand to reduce reliance on third-party booking systems.

Although these booking platforms work to promote the accommodation, they also take a large cut of the profit. We needed to, not only, identify how best to promote these cottages efficiently and profitably, but to start from scratch as the booking platforms share no data with the property owner. 

We were also going to be competing against the huge budgets that these booking platforms use to acquire their own customers and prevent brands from breaking away.

THE
     PROBLEM

THE
   OUTCOME

I created multiple campaigns with Google & Facebook Ads targeting a range of our key personas and demographics. Through the implementation of a sophisticated analytics set up, I was able to produce extra insight on each lead to highly which campaigns and audiences were working.

Having previously worked with this company on their luxury furniture business, I was able to tap into a similar audience that was searching for luxury and niche furniture and promote the same luxury accommodation. 

By doing this, I was able to succeed in moving the company away from relying on booking platforms, and secure them a window into an audience with whom to promote and advertise their accommodation at whim. 

INSIGHT
INTO THE EXECUTION

Luxury Cotswold Retreats has quite a niche audience as the accommodation has (rightly so) a luxury price tag, so typical, scatter-gun advertising approaches wouldn’t work. I used Google Ads to capture anyone searching for these specific types of accommodation, this was the low-hanging fruit that granted a solid foundation for the strategy.

Then, using rapid, low-cost experimentation on Facebook Ads, I identified a range of core audiences and personas that we could rely upon to convert consistently.

The strategy achieved success in beating the 19% CPA benchmark set by Airbnb. I created a fully-owned system to create a consistent stream of bookings - over the course of a 10 month period of optimisation, I reduced the Cost Per Enquiry by 76%, while maintaining the conversion rate to booking.

Start identifying the building bricks for your strategy, book a call today.

How would a hassle-free digital marketing implementation help your business?