Haka Tours
“Whip-smart, hot-on-the-tools and genuinely curious about how to make things tick better, Reuben, Gareth and the team at Double are the special sauce every business needs to level up its digital marketing. Hire them. Or don’t. But if you don’t, know that things could definitely be better”
Barnaby Laurence,
Head of Marketing, Haka Tourism Group
+51
%
Increase in Adwords Bookings
+20
%
Increase in Adwords conversion-rate
+18
%
Increase in bookings from Facebook
(Cut short by Covid-19)
About the Company
Haka Tours, established in 2007, has gone on to become what has been described as an inspirational tourism success story, which in 2017 won the supreme spot in Tourism Industry Aotearoa’s annual awards. They are regarded as New Zealand’s leading small group tour adventure operator.
Oct 2019 – March 2020
Oct 2019 – March 2020
Project brief
- Lead all performance advertising
- Takeover all Adwords & social media advertising
- Double tracked online bookings via advertising
- Build conversion & attribution tracking.
What we did
- Digital strategy
- Adwords
- Conversion rate optimisation
- Social campaign management
- Tracking & attribution dashboards
Major Challenges
- Growth amid unforeseeable events e.g. Brexit, White Island eruption and then Covid-19.
- Repurposing limited video content into fresh and engaging ads.
- Rethinking our targeting/tracking to attribute bookings over a 30-120 day consideration period.
Our Solution
We build a full advertising funnel across Facebook and Instagram that worked to find people planning to travel to NZ, and then educate and convince them of Haka Tours.
With no time to loose and to keep costs down we repurposed some old images/videos and oversaw the briefing/production of new Facebook/Instagram ad content.
Firstly, we learned that when selling a beautiful product, social media engagement is deceptive. We realised we had to track user engagement with non-sexy information (confirming their “true intent to travel”) to avoid wasting budget on people who like New Zealand but wouldn’t ever become a customer.
After setting up water-tight tracking for Facebook/Instagram campaigns, we could see where our leads come from and what ads/channels were delivering.
We built series of ads that served to introduce, educate and convert travelers. Our ad-funnel removed effort expected from a customer (getting them to visit our website and research), instead our series of ads stepped people through our products and major differentiators in bite-size images/videos. With tracking setup people didn’t see the same ads again and again, but ads that built on their knowledge and changed to use harder call-to-actions as some because more likely to purchase (eg: Book Now, Only $99 deposit etc.).
We explored our “pixel-audience strategy” that involved us combining our custom audiences with other tourism businesses to mutually advertise to people with high purchase intent.
Lastly, we helped with CRM integration, creating nurture funnels and guide Haka Tours into their transition with Salesforce.
