Delivering always-on paid socail.
In 2022, Celebrity Cruises decided to take an always-on approach to generating leads to their database.
With an ambitious target of growing Direct’s share of passenger numbers by 40% by 2025, they needed to significantly grow their audience and, in turn, their database.
Strategy
Paid social
Video
Strategy
To achieve this, part of the overall strategy was to use Facebook and partners with its targeting, creative and optimising capabilities. The plan was to combine lead generation into our Facebook marketing efforts of driving awareness, consideration and response, replacing what was top of funnel awareness with a lead generation ad where users could sign up directly rather than needing to visit the website to share contact details.
So now the job of the lead generation ad was twofold - not only did it have to drive leads, but also general brand awareness, which was a crucial part of the business-as-usual Facebook activity.
One of the ways that we tackled this was through defined audience selection at each stage of our strategy. This ensured we increased awareness without cannibalising any other part of the campaign, making use of broad cruise interests, people interested in competitor cruise lines and lookalikes derived from first-party website data, and previous Facebook lead submitters. Using this combination of audiences also proved vital for growing the volume of leads required.
Bringing all of our activity together, we integrated our lead gen efforts into other parts of the campaign by targeting people who watched videos from the lead gen activity, pushing consideration and guiding the user through the customer journey.
Ad testing was put in place using a mixture of formats such as standard static Newsfeed and video ads, carousels and slideshows, as well as testing value exchanges and other key Celebrity stories of the moment, like the launch of new Edge Class ship, Celebrity Beyond, to see what would secure the best engagement. Surprisingly it was the most generic version.
Lastly, budget optimisation played a big part in hitting the cost per lead (CPL) target. We found that whenever we increased spend to drive more leads, the CPL increased to unsuitable levels; therefore, testing different budgets allowed us to find the sweet spot between delivering lead volume and maintaining CPL.
Results
We worked diligently to fully harness the power of social platforms, driving sales, increasing leads and improving Celebrity’s online presence using a proven combination of data-led campaigning and creative thinking across management, advertising, remarketing and reporting.
The lead gen campaign delivered 32% more leads than gross target at a CPL of £4.18.
84% of these leads were new to Celebrity (not already on the database), achieving the key objective of reaching consumers new to the brand.
Once these leads entered the welcome journey, CTR from emails sent to this segment was the highest of all leads acquired by paid channels, at over 9%, with the lowest unsubscribe rate at under 0.4%. This proved that the leads driven to the database were of quality and fully engaged with the Celebrity Cruises’ brand.