Buxton Crescent Bookings
Services provided: Strategy, Creative Campaign, Paid Media, Content Creation, Organic Social.
Brief.
SHC served as the retained digital marketing agency for the Buxton Crescent Hotel from 2020 to 2024, navigating the hotel’s unique double-launch in 2021 due to Covid-19 lockdowns.
In 2023, following the hotel’s third birthday, SHC was briefed on delivering a summer campaign to drive day spa and hotel bookings directly through the Ensana website rather than through OTAs.
What We Did.
Buxton Crescent's digital marketing activity to date had focused on driving hotel and spa bookings geo-targeted to within 100 mile radius of Buxton and it was now time to broaden the targeting and target a much broader audience to reach the client's objective and targets.
Traditionally the target audience for Buxton Crescent has been age 45+ within 100 mile radius of Buxton, however, to drive a higher volume of bookings and revenue over the key summer periods, we created a younger audience segment of spa and hotel seekers aged 30+ within 250 mile radius of Buxton to ensure budget efficiency, rather than targeting nationwide across the UK.
Buxton Crescent opened in 2021, however, three years on it was no longer the latest spa opening in the UK and we needed to run a brand awareness campaign to put Buxton Crescent back at the forefront of spa and hotel guests mind when making a spa or hotel booking during the summer of 2024.
Buxton Crescent needed to show to the VC investors a 10% revenue growth YoY.
We knew we needed to drive wider awareness of Buxton Crescent to gain an increase in bookings YoY over the summer period. To do this we needed to launch a creative campaign which highlighted the key USPs of Buxton Crescent with a clear direct link to the Ensana website to drive direct bookings rather than guests bookings through OTAs such as Booking.com.
We devised a hero creative campaign, Every Last Drop, (see Vimeo file) which would highlight the benefits of Buxton Crescent spa facilities, restaurants and historic hotel setting. This full funnel campaign would focus on driving wider awareness, high-quality traffic to the Ensana site and bookings from direct response paid media activity with a maximum CPA of 20% of the average order value, to ensure we were competing with OTAs.
The multi-channel campaign ran across organic social, email, influencers and paid media through Meta, Google, Microsoft and native programmatic platforms to gain wider awareness and direct bookings with a target CPA of 20% of AOV and a target return on ad spend of at least 6:1.
Results.
Overall during the summer campaign period of June - August 2024, SHC increased overall bookings by 32% and increased revenue by 21% and delivered a blended 11:1 ROAS across all paid media activity.