Target Audience:
Who was/is the target audience?
Characterize the composition, size, and location of your target audience.
The target audience of this project is Marriott’s Corporate eCommerce team and individual Marriott Branded property level users managing digital marketing. Corporate level users can use the local citation report to view consistency on local channels like Google, Bing, data aggregators, maps, OTA’s for many properties across geographies all at once. Individual properties are also enabled to fix inconsistencies in URL, business name, phone number, Address, and other categories of information, to keep it correct and consistent across the entire ecosystem. In this way report directly impacts how customers choose hotels while booking online, while making the auditing process significantly easier.
Research, Planning, and Implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign?
Between Marriott Digital Services and The Milestone product management team quite a bit of work went into to defining the scope of the local listing audit, areas of efficiencies, and the delivery mechanism. The research included interviews with the Marriott team, demo workflows, process creation, prototype building, and software testing. The result was a product which solved the unique needs of the Marriott Digital Services team.
Message:
What is the key message intended for the piece/campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?
Milestone delivered a custom web-based report that rests within Marriott’s omnichannel reporting platform, which is now been accessed by properties worldwide and used for auditing digital performance. This solution innovates in three ways; 1) Marriott is now able to automate reporting which has saved them hundreds of hours of manual work 2) Marriott is now set up to easily identify the inconsistent local channels by property and region, and quickly resolve issues of inaccuracy 3) This report has directly improved the overall digital presence of Marriott properties on Google, Bing and the digital ecosystem at large.
Results:
Which of your original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns.
The customized local citation report that Milestone developed for Marriott led to reports being generated within a couple of days for thousands of hotels with great accuracy. Individual property level users are enabled with the ability to track the specific total number of listings that have been submitted, the number of correct submissions, and total listing inaccuracies by property.
Each individual hotel report provides specific channel level audits and recommendations to fix inconsistencies, which makes it very easy for property level users to maintain their online presence continually.
The report is a very effective base for doing a pre and post analysis of inaccuracies The UI of the report is so simple that non-technical audience can read the results and understand the actions needed.
Entry Title
Milestone and Marriott Digital Services (MDS) Joint submission on Local Citation Report
Sub-category
Digital Marketing Innovation
Category
Digital Marketing Innovation