A white-wash of influencer talent creates a experience not to be missed
As Australian’s, we love eating out. Our spend on ‘dining out’ in metro areas has seen a steady increase over the last 10 years.
This has seen a significant jump in dining options from casual to high end and everything in between. Where once hotels enjoyed being a significant sector within dining selection, this has changed and the landscape has embraced more casual and ‘experience’ dining challenging their traditional dominance. Marriot’s challenge was to get back onto the shortlist of diner’s minds in a country with some of the best restaurants and eating experiences in the world.
We looked at a way to help drive a connected brand narrative across several Marriott restaurants, all of which have their own personalities, cuisines and ‘occasion’ drivers.
"Deepend’s strength is in its complete understanding of brand building and then using data to drive acquisition, it’s a rare combination and was a key driver for our ‘Only Ingredient’ campaign."
Florencia Aimo - Area Director of Marketing Marriott
We dove into the eating habits of Australians and found strong data to support an occasion focused campaign driving a common brand narrative to join the restaurants through their common connections of being ‘the Only Ingredient’ needed for a great dining experience.
With our brand hats firmly on we wanted to raise the level of awareness and overall connection to our dining consumer by creating an influencer experience, with our sister agency History Will Be Kind, where we took ten key influencers to a beautiful location to recreate childhood food memories with our amazing chefs.
Creating an amazing experience
We hand picked a range of east coast influencer talent with a passion for dining and gave them a unique experience in Victoria’s wine region. We flew them in and indulged their love of food, food writing, creativity and photography to showcase a co-designed recipe they worked on for the day, by pairing them with our amazing chefs.
We chose a mix of social talent and media professionals to ensure we would get the right coverage to inform the audience we knew was interested about the amazing range of opportunities and food through the chefs that run the kitchens at fourteen of Marriott’s best east coast restaurants.
The day was an amazing success with everyone embracing the experience and taking it back to their own audiences. We created the spark that drove deep levels of content creation, sharing and amplification across a wide range of channels, both socially and in traditional media.
Creativity and data are joined at the hip at Deepend. Whether we’re using system data to understand the right channels and platforms, or human data to make sure that what we create connects through insights and empathy. For Marriott it was no different, we drove not only brand engagement but also acquisition with smart audience profiling, retargeting and broader look-a-like amplification.
Target, Amplify, Retarget & Convert
We take a holistic view of conversion activity and always ensure we’re targeting the right audience in order to test and learn quickly about their reactions to the creative assets we’re serving. We’re able to identify what works quickly and scale audiences and drive reach & engagement fast and effectively.
Brand drives acquisition, drives brand
We take a complete view when balancing brand activity with conversion driven work. Brand helps stimulate higher funnel activity and our lower funnel channels react, capture and convert that awareness with more granular messaging and creative.
Creative stories are the heart of the campaign
Relatable content that creates relevance for Marriot is what helped ensure the content created for the campaign connected and drove action through our audiences. As influencers shared their experience with Marriott’s chefs, we were able to turn that into creative elements people wanted to consume and share.
We leverage Google and Facebooks platforms to ensure we’re able to make the most of the brand campaign and supporting acquisition drive.
Tech serves the story, it doesn’t write it
We make a clear distinction for the role of tech in marketing, it’s there to ensure we’re reaching the right people, with the most relevant message that either provides footprints to help us understand how to get to a conversion, or learn quickly to walk a new path if needed.
Test, learn, react, respond
Our media strategy is 100% evidence based and we use the right tech to make sure we know enough to build the campaign experience. We were able to use Googles ‘people visited’ data to know who has seen our content and what percentage drove to restaurants visits, not simply digital ‘bookings’.
Reporting is only useful if it gives insights
We love reporting useful information that drives action, not 100 slides that bores you into acceptance. We use tech to facilitate understanding and provide a pathway for action that yields results.
Results Listing
The campaign helped create
The campaign helped created over 345 distinct pieces of creative at the beginning of the campaign and throughout as we ‘tested and learned’ our way to success.
We reached 5 million
We reached 5 million (95% of our target) through strategic targeting. Clever media optimisation use saw us reach our audience effectively and fast.
We drove incremental revenue
We drove incremental revenue of up to 30% for some restaurants during the campaign (10% lift across the board).
40% lift in ‘restaurant I want to visit’
Brand dips on the restaurants before and after the campaign show a 40% lift in ‘restaurant I want to visit’, all of which is driving ongoing BAU conversion activity and continuous improvement post the campaigns completion.
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