#MarketingExcellenceAwards 2020 highlight: Pan Pacific Hotels Group's key ingredient to gain competitive advantage

Winning two gold awards for the categories Excellence in Data-Driven Marketing and Excellence in eCommerce Marketing at this year's Marketing Excellence Awards 2020 is Pan Pacific Hotels Group (PPHG). Owning multiple hotels in the region under its Pan Pacific and PARKROYAL brands, PPHG was facing a challenge in growing market share in an increasingly competitive environment. While it was difficult to fend off its competitors on a performance level, PPHG chose to focus on standing out to its consumers and leveraging one thing its competitors do not have- its first-party data.

Tapping on the expertise on digital agency Mezzo Labs, PPHG set out to create an internal infrastructure that would give more insights into its consumer behaviour and figure out the their pain points. This would allow the company to make more informed marketing choices to attract consumers to its website. Let's take a deeper look into how PPHG proved the value in its first-party data. 

Challenge

Similar to other regional hotel groups, PPHG faced the digital threat of the online travel agents (OTAs) stealing its lunch at the top of the funnel, the short-term rental market stealing it at the bottom, and the “always on” threat of the large holding groups with a huge selection of properties from multiple brands all under one roof. This meant PPHG found it hard to both cut through at a brand level and compete from a performance level as the reach and budgets of their competition were just too high.

Additionally, PPHG had also acquired a number of martech platforms in the preceding two to three years which were not being made to work as hard as they could. It was an investment which was not helping it maximise its ability to compete and win in the marketplace, and there were questions over whether the team was pursuing the right strategic and technical approach.

Therefore, it tapped collaborated with data consultancy firm Mezzo Labs to help it define a new strategy that was based on answering four fundamental challenges:

1. How do we compete with OTA’s who are taking an increasing share of our digital sales?
2. How do we make our current digital platforms work harder in converting users?
3. What can we do to learn more about our existing digital users?
4. Why aren’t we getting the full value from our existing data and marketing technology?

This led PPHG to set four Phase One objectives for the programme which would fundamentally change its business:

1. Deliver a 20% increase in search-to-book conversion rate
2. Deploy Conversion Rate Optimisation programmes on-site to drive bookings
3. Audit and analyse user behaviours and digital segments
4. Build a richer, trusted, data set through re-implementing key platforms

Through these objectives, PPHG would be able to prove the value of its martech investment by creating value out of PPHG’s first-party data that would additionally secure additional investment in both a future-state technology road-map for the next two to three years.

Strategy

PPHG’s first-party data was the one thing they had which its competitors could not buy or replicate. It was genuinely unique and if collected, connected and utilised right, it could hope to provide an outstanding and relevant experience which would secure a larger market share. 

To do this, PPHG had to devise a combination of strategic and technical improvements which would unlock the value in its first-party data. It needed to show value that would further allow PPHG to build a business-case for a deeper investment in the tools and technologies to power the long-term personalisation goal. Using first party data to power a conversion rate optimisation programme would clearly show tangible commercial benefits alongside delivering the foundational capabilities to collect, connect and utilise data.

PPHG and Mezzo Labs conceptualised from day one that building PPHG’s competitive advantage through first party data was an iterative multi-year project, and each phase would build upon the last and progressively build not only capabilities but commercial impact.

The team therefore came up with two things: a clear, visual representation of the value it wanted to drive in the key parts of PPHG’s sales funnel, as well as a target state data architecture which would enable the team to articulate the long-term technical vision it was building towards.

Phase One would focus on putting some of the foundational pieces of the architecture in place, testing it, and showing it can drive the incremental value the team promised. Having this architecture articulated meant there were no surprises and the executives knew what the vision entailed.

Execution

PPHG’s Phase One was focused on putting the fundamental capabilities in place to enable the data-driven vision, whilst also ensuring the team showed tangible value by the end of the first year.

Its first activity was to re-implement key parts of the underlying technical analytics architecture, allowing it to collect the digital data needed to achieve objective two. It also built a new measurement framework across all of its digital touchpoints, and re-implemented various analytics technologies including Adobe Launch and Analytics to help it build a fuller picture of its customers.

Once that data was being collected, the team undertook two pieces of work to fulfil objective three.

1. Build dashboards to provide PPHG with a daily and monthly view of user behaviours and marketing performance in PowerBI
2. Create the first behavioural analysis and digital segmentation of PPHG’s digital users

The first output gave PPHG the ability to understand how users moved across channels and interacted with their digital platforms, allowing the company to make swift marketing decisions. The second output was designed to form the foundation of a deeper personalisation programme in Phase Two.

This approach led PPHG to create its very first digital segments, which is a core requirement for the team to explore genuine digital personalisation. PPHG created these segments based primarily on clickstream analytics data, starting simple before adding additional sources.

The segments were quite unlike anything PPHG had before, which was based on more traditional marketing personas. This gave PPHG a new way to think about the audiences who came to its digital platforms and meant the team could be confident in changing from testing general user experience or conversion improvements through AB testing to proper audience-driven personalisation.

Besides the digital segmentation, there was also the aspect of behavioural analysis. PPHG analysed the popular paths to conversion and noticed visitors tend to go back and forth between the search results page and guest details page in order to modify their selection and dates.

The analysis showed where users were struggling in the user journey as well as allowing PPHG to group its consumers into four key segments which the team would use in later phases once the technology was in place to support it.

PPHG also ran eight tests across the awareness, engagement, and conversion parts of PPHG’s user journey, using the quantitative behavioural analysis work alongside the qualitative data from its Usabilla survey tool to provide hypotheses as to why customers were not completing bookings.

PPHG focused on getting people to make a search, and then making the booking flow as simple as possible, to ensure people completed their booking direct, rather than going back to the OTA’s or competitor sites.

Results

Through the campaign, PPHG and Mezzo Labs managed to achieve a 25.6% increase in its search-to-book conversion rate. It also saw 6,299 incremental bookings as well as US$3.5 million incremental programme revenue.

More than just the top line numbers, the work across 2019 and 2020 provided a few key other insights. First was how each of the test experiences impacted different parts of the sales funnel. This was valuable as it allowed PPHG to understand its audience’s preferences better.