How this marketer helped hotels tap new revenue streams

One of the silver linings of 2020 was the way marketers stepped up to assist their colleagues in sectors in need.

Co-founder of carpark booking service Share With Oscar, Louise Chen, could see the impact border closures and travel restrictions from the Covid-19 pandemic were having on the accommodation sector. While hotels were no longer able to accommodate the same volume of guests, Chen realised that didn’t mean they couldn’t still accommodate cars.

“At the time, we had already been working with a few hotels and we felt a real pull to try and do a bit more for these hotels,” Chen told CMO.

So in September of last year, Share With Oscar launched a new campaign to alert its customers to the availability of unused hotel parking spaces around Sydney.

“More people were driving to work at the time, so this was really about getting people to look at another option of where they could potentially be parking, and contributing to helping out this industry,” Chen said. “We were able to quite quickly raise awareness and get those spaces booked, and we’ve been able to help more than 40 hotels generate extra revenue.

“On average, a car space earns about $500 a month, so revenue really varies across different hotels depending on the size of their carpark. But on a monthly basis we were able to help generate quite significant revenue to help that industry.”

One of the keys to the campaign’s success was Share With Oscar’s use of marketing insights platform, Metigy, which Chen said helped it optimise spend.

“Being a small team, we just don’t have the time to push out a piece of content across multiple channels and look at every single component manually,” she said. “We had previously used Metigy for a campaign earlier in 2020, which was our Covid appeal. We appealed to local residents and businesses to share their parking spaces with healthcare workers, and that was hugely successful. What we were looking to do was replicate a similar thing for the hospitality industry.”

Metigy co-founder and CEO, David Fairfull said Metigy was able to assist Share With Oscar by analysing which content was proving most successful and making recommendations on its promotion, while also optimising syntax and hashtags.

“We are SME focused and we provide decision support in the micro moments of marketing,” Fairfull said. “If you are just blasting out ads with conventional distribution then it is a highly expensive way to do it. The logic is you want to understand what customers are connecting with, and ultimately turn that into a successful comms program.”

Chen said there were multiple times through the campaign where Share With Oscar received recommendations from Metigy that optimised its spend.

“They were really valuable, because having that feedback whilst you are running a campaign, and being able to make those changes to maximise how the campaign is going, was really effective, and we were able to put those into action quite quickly,” Chen said.

“Over time, we have actually managed to decrease our cost of acquisition by almost half, and what we have also been able to see from Metigy is our engagement rates have increased by 150 per cent.”

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