Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
Once known as the Sir Francis Drake, the relaunched Beacon Grand has been a center of gravity beckoning San Franciscans and visitors alike to Union Square for almost a century. This iconic property was primed for a comprehensive brand overhaul, from name, to guest experience, to messaging, to look and feel, to digital marketing—here at the center of a city known for reinvention, everything has been built from the ground up to position this hotel as “The Home Of” a new era.
FINE developed and tested multiple concepts were to arrive at a new brand campaign centered on a few key goals and objectives:
Target Audience: The leisure traveler actively looking beyond big flag brands and trendy brands to find the true, boutique experience of San Francisco.
Key Messaging Objective: Introduce Beacon Grand as a quintessential SF original; the home and embodiment of the things that make The City what it is. And standout from the vanilla landscape of box hotels with templated campaigns.
Push current brand standards with style, content, and images that stand out and evoke intrigue and invoke action from the new traveler.
Celebrate the property’s historic character but embrace a more forward-thinking edge and personality for its new generation of guests.
Key Marketing Objective(s): With the property’s first-ever rebrand as the focal point, against a backdrop of a local tourism downturn and new big flag competitors, marketing metrics needed to “break through the clutter” and show results measured by how well they:
- Drive Revenue
- Increase Conversion Rate while lowering Cost Per Click
- Deliver exceptional return on ad spend
All told, the channels involved include organic search, paid media, and social media strategy to extend this brand “traction” campaign and attract a whole new generation of guests to the heart of San Francisco. In particular, key campaign channels included social and display remarketing.
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. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
After evaluating multiple directions to determine which best met campaign goals, the chosen campaign theme was “The Home Of” campaign. The concept centers on Beacon Grand as a hotel that’s not just IN San Francisco, sometimes called the “living room” of the city, but a hotel that IS San Francisco.
Being “Home Of San Francisco” means being home to all the rich culture and experience you come to discover. Beacon Grand is uniquely positioned to help guests visit more than just the obvious tourist spots of the city, with Social Hosts on staff here to unlock the unknowns.
The campaign hinged on extravagant photography with almost tongue-in-cheek glamor, paired with specific visit drivers that connect to search and booking occasions (i.e., hotels near Chinatown, PRIDE week hotels, hotels for couples, theatergoers, etc) while promising to deliver The City’s surprises and delights. It’s cable cars but also chic events. It’s dim sum and then some. It’s rainbow pride and rebel spirit.
To arrive at this preferred campaign and channels, the FINE approach called for standout creative backed by a rigorous A/B Testing Plan:
- Round 1: Test campaign creative against our current top-performing creative.
- Round 2: Narrow to best 2 performing campaigns with 2 different opening headlines/photo pairs.
- Round 3: Test top performing campaign with best-performing headline/photo in 2 look and feel directions.
- Round 4+: Taking the winner, continue to optimize with alternatives for headline, short description, and key photos
Ultimately, campaign metrics like Return on Ad Spend, Revenue Growth, CPC, and impressions continued to improve throughout the duration of the campaign and to this day. Also important: imagery, copy, and design styles established for this campaign solidified the brand experience and positioning by offering an homage to a locally loved, historic property, and sharing an enhanced sense of The City’s irreverent personality and forward-thinking spirit.
Return on Investment: How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
Focusing on channels that make way for visual branding, the FINE campaign drove demonstrable results. Without divulging complete budget details, the returns were substantial against all objective measures, particularly in the two channels that, through testing, became the optimal media for the messages:
Social Metrics
A +66% MoM improvement in Social Remarketing ROAS. The single highest revenue month for social campaigns in the history of the hotel when the creative went live
+500% increase in monthly average purchases by +500% in March/April 2023
Display Metrics
+14% Display Remarketing Revenue increase from the month before the new campaign went live
-10% decrease in Cost per Click
+62% increase in Clickthroughs
+ The month that the new creative went live was the highest revenue month for Display campaigns in the history of the brand program
Division
Advertising - Brand Campaign