Objectives

Marriott Americas Brand, Marketing & Digital team, which is focused on driving room nights and revenue across US and Canada destinations, executed a unique creative strategy across Facebook's three layers of travel targeting. This campaign targeted travelers across the consumer funnel with Facebook Trip Consideration and DAT Broad Audiences with unique, destination-based videos and Instant Experiences to drive performance.

Strategy and Execution

Demonstrate destination prospecting fueled with robust creative drives incremental destination site traffic/searches. Show increased site visits through Trip Consideration linking to destination search pages on marriott.com and DAT Broad Audiences linking to the property pages. We tested five key travel destinations including Phoenix, Boston, Washington D.C., Orlando and NYC promoting our loyalty program, Marriott Rewards throughout the creative. This pilot across the five markets helped confirm our approach to roll this out to more markets throughout US/Canada in 2019.

Results

The Marriott Americas Brand, Marketing, Digital team, wanted to test destination-led creative prospecting and its effects on Marriott's business. The team put together a few ideas and eventually decided on an out-of-the-box idea, recommending immersive mobile-first creative leveraging Facebook's Travel Prospecting targeting segments – aiming to reach millions of travelers worldwide while producing incremental value for Marriott's core business.

The results were a success. The campaign:

• Reached over 30mm travelers in 200 countries, generating over 800,000 site searches, 700,000 property views, and 30,000 bookings.
  
  
• Achieved statistically significant (90%) lift results – demonstrating a strong (and positive) correlation between destination creative and incremental site activity.
  
  
• Exceeded engagement goals, achieving a very low-cost $0.05 per engagement, with users viewing over 50% of the Instant Experiences.

Both Trip Consideration and Dynamic Broad Audiences paired very well together, delivering strong overall results while creating immersive and engaging mobile-first experiences.

The test confirmed our approach, and destination-led creative will now roll out across North American campaigns.

Creative:

Media