We began working with The Grand, York in 2018, with the primary objective of increasing hotel bookings, whilst also supporting on driving conversions across The Grand’s additional – and valuable – services; weddings, events, spa, cookery school and their restaurant. We created a custom tracking solution to consolidate sales and revenue data across 3 different booking platforms, which has informed our integrated organic and paid strategy with invaluable customer journey data. This data feeds into our digital PR strategy to support brand awareness and key SEO terms, and we’ve achieved national coverage in publications including The Guardian, Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and Homes & Gardens helping to gain wider geographical brand awareness. This has translated to huge visibility increases and specifically, to meet the objective of supporting The Grand’s additional services, we’ve achieved number 1 rankings for the following terms; “wedding packages York”, “spa York” and “cookery courses York”.
147% increase in PPC revenue.
Key to any online strategy for a hotel, is factoring in online travel agent (OTA) performance. Our strategy for The Grand has never been about competing with OTAs but working alongside them to understand profitability and the customer journey through OTAs compared to direct bookings. We can then use this analysis to better optimise activity. Our paid approach is heavily concentrated on continuous testing, which has meant we’ve been able to optimise campaigns around high-intent periods of the month and optimise messaging to drive the highest CTR and bookings. Additionally, our paid strategy looks to reduce the hotel’s reliance on bookings from two main locations, and encourage wider national and international traffic.