Precision marketing leads to record-breaking sales

Brand problem

To escape the heat of UAE summers, when temperatures rise above 40oC, many residents favour European holiday destinations. There is an endless variety of vacation packages to choose from as travel agencies compete for their share of sales during this peak season. In such a competitive environment, conversion is a real challenge and can become an expensive numbers game.

In such a competitive environment, conversion is a real challenge and can become an expensive numbers game.

Al Rostamani Travel, one of the UAE’s top travel agencies, wanted to promote their own portfolio of European destinations and summer holiday deals. They also wanted to maximise their chances of conversion.

Lemon thinking

The Al Rostamani team trusted in Lemon’s expertise and followed our lead in trying something they had not done before: a digital lead generation campaign.

Solution

Based on our carefully crafted digital media strategy and media plan, the campaign ran for 45 days before the summer period and yielded excellent results. The strategy relied on three pillars – selecting the right platform, identifying the audience sets, and determining the best creative format to be used.

• Our platforms of choice were Facebook and Instagram. These channels remain the most popular social media to share rich travel-related content and the most widely used channels by our target audience – Dubai and Abu Dhabi residents, over 25 years old, interested in travel, and searching for holiday destinations.
• To define our audience set, we first used data from the travel database and enriched it with additional customers interested in travel; we then identified and added their “lookalikes”. To ensure we only targeted people who could afford holidays in Europe, we had to select customers with the right purchasing power. Since it is not possible to segregate audiences by income level, and given that income data is rarely reliable, we found an even better solution: to cross-reference our set against the audience interested in luxury goods.
• We ran carousel ads – the most suitable format to showcase all countries and offers in one campaign – and consequently improved chances of conversion.
• For even better results, we created a custom lead generation form on the platforms and ran real-time optimization to generate a higher return on our client’s ad spend.

Results

Al Rostamani Travel’s first lead generation digital campaign became one of their most successful initiatives and yielded impressive results: an excellent 11% click to leads conversion rate and overachieved the initial lead generation target by 21%.