How it Works in Practice

Melt du Plooy our Search Marketing Manager sat and chatted to Edwin Swan, one of our Clients to talk about a recent campaign, Smitten with Football, we ran for Edwin. (Edwin Swan is the SA Country Manager for VisitBritain).

"VisitBritain is Britain's national tourism agency, responsible for marketing Britain worldwide. The role of the Country Manager includes promoting the British travel product as a visitor destination, to generate additional tourism revenue throughout Britain and throughout the year."

Q	What were your objectives for the Smitten with Football campaign?

It was important for us to reposition Britain as a destination of choice focusing on key target markets i.e., youth and especially emerging black middle class markets. Entertainment was one of the key triggers that were identified which included elements like shopping, fashion, nightlife, and sport. The strategy was backed by a Mastercard study where 66% of money spent by South Africans overseas is on entertainment. Smitten with Britain is a platform we developed to showcase all of these triggers. Smitten with Football was the first promotion of the campaign offering tours at great rates through various Partners with a competition as a strong call-to-action to drive awareness. The Secondary objectives of the campaign were to develop a platform for partnerships as well as commercial sales & building a subscriber/consumer database within the target market.

Q	How was this campaign activated and what channels did you utilise?

By means of an offline to online integrated campaign, on TV (SuperSport 15 second ad during Premier league football matches), Promotional banner inserts in mailers (joburg.co.za, capetown.co.za and durban.co.za), banners on news sites (Beeld, Citizen) and Pay Per Click campaigns on Google to the local South African search market.

Q	What was your budget split across the channels - offline, online (PPC/banners/mailers)?

A	TV 70% Banners 10% Promo mailers 1% PPC 19% R43K

Q	A Total of 2894 leads were generated. The results gained from the PPC campaign specifically were 3980 click throughs and 421 conversions. Did this meet your expectation interms of overall marketing objectives?

A	This results in a 10.58% conversion rate and a cost per click of R3,77. So if you consider that the cost per conversion was R35.69, this is very reasonable for new signups (cost per acquisition) compared to a viral of an owned database.

Q	Midway through the campaign the PPC landing page creative was tweaked in order to achieve higher conversions, do you believe that this result was achieved?

A	Absolutely, the click rate and interest increased and shows that the landing page and clear call to action is so important. You also can build a page and launch a campaign and just leave it, but it takes constant monitoring to ensure great results.

Q	Compared to TV, Banner, and newsletter advertising cost per lead generated would you say that PPC was a; cheap marketing tool; comparable; or more expensive?

TV cost per conversion was so high that we cut the budget and stopped the campaign short and converted to online channels only. Compared to the other channels in this campaign PPC was a relatively cheap way to generate leads at a cost of R35.69 per lead. Email newsletters appeared to be more cost effective at R27.00 per lead but were only good for short term bursts. (After week 1 interest faded away the longer emails remain unattended.) For banner advertising the cost per lead was R57.00 per lead with low volumes on click through but high conversions. In this campaign these results showed clearly as shown in the table below: This is the first year of a 3 year campaign with the first campaign the ROI was good but I believe that in the second campaign there will be more awareness and a higher ROI of around 20% will be achieved.

Q	With 2010 fast approaching there is alot of interest in travel to South Africa, would you recommend that Travel companies use this as a key tool within their marketing mix?

Absolutely, be it for longer term campaigns or shorter term promotions specifically targeted keywords will get high results and traffic to your site, linking in this instance will not necessarily generate results you are looking for so search is the way forward. Travellers are researching now to see how they want to travel, what they can do here in SA, where they can stay and the associated costs so it is essential that every operator is visible for the service they offer.

Q	When you select the winner for this competition what criteria will you use and what has the person won?

We randomly select 5 people from the database, the 1st selected person must qualify to travel overseas (passport etc) if they do not meet the criteria then the 2nd person on the list becomes eligible and the winner forfeits their rights altogether. The prize as mentioned earlier is a trip to watch one of the Barclays Premier League matches in the UK.

Check out these great links for tips on what to look for to design an effective landing page for a campaign; Creating Effective Landing Pages by Michael Bloch and 9 Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page by Saad Kamal