Amaryllis Hotel is Malawi’s leading hotel, home to outstanding luxury and friendly service. Located in the heart of Blantyre-the second-largest city, our 91 well-furnished guest rooms and suites enjoy vantage points of private balconies, terraces, or sundeck entertainment areas. Amaryllis offers the perfect venue for any event, be it a conference, board meeting or lavish employee incentive with a combination of elegance, luxury and cutting-edge technology that delivers extra-special experiences and memories to last a lifetime.
THE CHALLENGE.
Coming out of a pandemic, Amaryllis Hotels required a result driven strategy that will significantly increase direct bookings and gradually eliminate reliance on Online Travel Agencies (OTA) platforms that charges exorbitant commissions on each room sold. Before now, more than 75% of the hotel occupancy rate has been solely dependent on bookings from OTAs like bookings.com, expedia.com e.t.c.
In addition to this, Amaryllis Hotels was struggling with their online digital presence and was seeking a digital-tech agency with rigorous transformation capabilities to add value to the brand and increase it’s digital presence utilizing the best technology available.
As a relatively new brand in Pan-African market space, Amaryllis Hotels needed a strategy to enable the hotel brand intensify sales in the domestic market Malawi and penetrate other major African markets like South Africa, Zambia, Botswana e.t.c, acquire inbound leisure/business travelers (for both hotel accommodation & events/conferencing) from these countries and above all drive sales, thus taking the brand to the next level.
It is therefore imperative that the appointed agency not only understands the African market, its tourism industry but also what makes African tick thereby differentiating the Hotel brand from its competitors. Amaryllis Hotels tasked CreativeMagic Group with this challenge. The results speak for themselves.
THE MAGIC WE DID.
CAMPAIGN STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT.
CreativeMagic formulated a result driven strategy for the performance campaign. The strategy utilized available data and targets specific audience (male and female, age 22 – 50, high income level and across all devices) based on their interests (Recreation, tourism, travel, hotels and inns, entertainment and leisure, news, visiting cultural and entertainment events, attractions, business and career, business trips, hotels and air tickets) and behavioral pattern. We then modelled an audience similar (i.e look-alike audience) in behavioral characteristics on the open web to the target audience of the client and thereafter a re-targeting campaign. The KPI for the campaign is conversions.
The campaign utilized programmatic ad-tech solution. Programmatic advertising uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to automate and streamline ad buying process. It delivers both broad and accurate targeting of audiences achieved through the combination of inventory on sites relevant to the brand.
THE MAGIC WE DID.
WEBSITE REVAMP & LANDING PAGE DEVELOPMENT.
CreativeMagic completely revamped the Amaryllis Hotels website as the very first step of the strategy execution. The website was built on latest PHP 8.2 technology and Laravel PyroCMS Framework. Entire project was completed within six weeks including web copy writing and photography. In addition, our dev team is currently developing a more robust booking engine (with payment gateway) for the hotel brand alongside marketing automation. The completed website is user friendly, easy to navigate and fully responsive to all screen sizes across all [mobile] devices.
CreativeMagic put in place a brilliant landing page for the campaign with a simple call-to-action, installed tracking + conversion pixels, set up automations, analytics and reporting.
THE MAGIC WE DID.
CAMPAIGN VIDEOS & ARTWORKS
CreativeMagic created several digital assets for the Amaryllis Campaign including banner artwork designs and videos used for Facebook & Youtube ads. CreativeMagic Group has a fantastic track record of creating high impact, very cost effective quick cut videos for brands, charities and organisations for both TV and online.
THE MAGIC WE DID.
PROGRAMMATIC CAMPAIGN REALIZATION.
CreativeMagic used 1st party and 3rd party data to form the custom segments of the target audience. The chosen advertising formats were in-steam, out-stream video and animated banner. In-stream video was shown mostly on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, the animated gif banners, native, and out-stream video on news/travel websites and other websites interesting for the target audience.
In order not to overload the audience with the same ads, CreativeMagic set up ad creatives synchronization across different devices of one user. The ads were shown to one user no more than four times. Setting up look-alike targeting after one week of the campaign. Advertising materials were shown to the users who have similar behavior to the current website audience. Both manual and automatic optimization was used in a real time regime during the advertising campaign. Automated optimization technology Bid Factors allocated budget to the better reacting audience segments (higher CTR rate) and targets.
THE MAGIC WE DID.
THE CAMPAIGN RESULTS.
The result speaks volume. It proves that the targeting settings were set up correctly, and the advertising formats were picked right. The View-Through-Rate (VTR) and Click-Through-Rate (CTR) rates exceeded the planned number monthly with the same monthly adspend. The direct bookings from the Amaryllis website exceeds the projected figures each month. The aim of the advertising campaign was reached successfully and very progressive.
The Covid-19 Pandemic affected our business, we were seriously struggling with bookings and our occupancy rate was at it’s lowest. We engaged CreativeMagic Group as our agency and they assisted us formulate a strategy that looks inwards to boost our direct bookings domestically in Malawi and penetrate the markets in other neighboring countries; Zambia, Zimbabwe & South Africa. We gradually see significant increase in our occupancy rate and in direct bookings via our website rather than on OTA platforms. The CPA gradually dropped! Our conference and event bookings are also significantly increasing each month. CreativeMagic worked closely with our sales/marketing team to understand the dynamics of our business. John leads the team and he has been really helpful. His team is swift to action & with quick turn around time. We are now focusing on more important aspects of our business like guests experience and general operations of the business. We are proud to take on with CreativeMagic Group as our partner and agency of choice.”
– Ramy Waheed,
General Manager at Amaryllis Hotel Blantyre – Malawi.
