How Hilton and iProspect maximized results with full-funnel marketing campaigns

Danielle Gonzales: Full-funnel strategy to me is knowing that every moment counts, and that is bringing awareness, consideration, intent, and conversion to booking, all in one plan that delivers results.

Rebecca Panico: I was doing a lot of reflecting on the journey that our teams have been on from the onset of why we launched our “It Matters Where You Stay” campaign and our “For The Stay” platform.

So this was a really big endeavor for Hilton at a time when we know consumers are behaving differently. They’re thinking about travel differently.

We needed to do something different. I think as we were doing a lot of work in consumer exploration, what we really learned is that the stay makes or breaks any trip.

[Hilton “For The Stay” Ad plays]

[Mom] This is the hotel breakfast?

[Narrator in voice-over] When free hot breakfast can make or break your day it matters where you stay.

Hampton by Hilton.

Hilton. For the stay.

Gonzales: It’s a human insight, and it’s so powerful; and it was that insight that just helped us guide the entire plan in its totality.

Panico: At the center of this strategy was video. We knew that a key insight was over 60% of our audiences are turning to YouTube on a weekly basis, and we know that we had all of this video available to us. But what we wanted to understand was: What is the right creative for the right audience?

And so we really wanted to use different types of targeting technologies and Google AI to ensure that we understood what message was the right message for the right audience.

Gonzales: The reason why I think YouTube works is it’s so powerful in reaching the scale of our audience, but it’s also the types of learnings that we can garner, that we can start to apply in other places to make sure we are optimizing at the speed of what we need for this business, and we’re converting as quickly as possible.

Panico: You know, if YouTube’s at the center, search is around the center.

Gonzales: Yeah, we used search in a very different way for this campaign. We didn’t look at it just as performance lower-funnel conversion, but we looked at search as helping us drive consideration and even lift intent in several different factors.

The amount of volume of search increased for us, because video was driving people to be more inquisitive, and then they wanted to find more information. So we saw a direct connection between the YouTube work that we were doing, and then what we were seeing from a search perspective.

Gonzales: The results were phenomenal. We saw lifts in awareness; we saw lifts in consideration, intent; we saw lifts in bookings. I mean, across the board, every number went up. And it went up beyond the investment that we had made.

Panico: Yeah, as we start to think about where “For The Stay” can go, I’m really excited about taking all of these learnings that we’ve been able to capture on YouTube using Google AI and inform our campaign for the future.

And I’m just so grateful that we have such a collaborative relationship that allows us to push and pull each other to ensure that we are constantly looking forward.