Defining a Hotel Chain’s ROI (and ensuing bookings) from their Social Content
The Canadian division of a global hotel holding company, with multiple brand banners and hundreds of locations across Canada, recognized the growing importance of social media to their business. As they embarked on developing a social content strategy framework, they also sought to better understand and evaluate the Return on Investment (ROI) of content published through their owned social channels.
Their Need
Having hired a social media consultancy to help establish a framework for defining & developing ongoing social content and presence, our proprietary methods of social campaign optimization were leveraged to help define successful Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Effort (ROE) for their social channels, with an emphasis on Facebook given its reach and usage in Canada.
Our Approach
Working in concert with the client’s social media consultancy partner, we developed a testing & measurement framework which would help identify the types of content, media support thresholds, audience segments and publishing considerations to maximize social ROI and ROE. Not merely content to measure engagement or leads, we defined true ROI as delivering profitable bookings to the property’s own booking engine.
The Results
Over a three-month testing & measurement period, we evaluated and identified the relative strength of ten different categories of content against five key target personas, mapped to maximize reach and publishing frequency to best define the optimal plans for social content management. We were able to define ROI benchmarks by measuring direct-channel hotel reservations (allowing us to establish which strategies provided a net positive Cost-Per-Acquisition to make their social content, in essence, a revenue-generating solution) and the thresholds for media-supported ROI. We then armed the client’s internal teams – responsible for managing the ongoing publishing – with the insights to understand the ROE for their finite resources (time, promotion budgets, content development costs) and a clear means for driving positive ROI from their owned social channels.