Crazy Marketing Lesson We Learned From Expedia

0:00All right, here's a crazy marketing lesson that we learned from Expedia. so years ago one of our mutual friends tony ty worked at expedia and i remember i was in the canada expedia office it was based in toronto they may have more than one but i was in their toronto office and he was showcasing and sharing some stats with me one of the crazy ones that he shared with me was he said hey do you know when expedia does omni-channel marketing so he's not just talking about like expedia everyone knows expedia but most people don't realize they have Hotels.com, Travelocity. They used to have TripAdvisor.

0:35I think they owned a large chunk of Travago and the list goes on and on. But what he was saying is they did an experiment. And what they did as an experiment is let's say if they're normally just running pay-per-click ads, then they started mixing like SEO and television ads and then radio ads. When they took an omni-channel approach and the campaigns integrated with each other, and they were doing multiple channels, four, five, six, seven, et cetera, when they started adding more channels, the results started getting better per channel. And on average, they saw uplift of around 10%. Now think about that.

1:09Everyone already knows Expedia, or even if you're talking about their smaller brands like Hotels.com, at least in the United States, which is one of their large markets, even though they run TV commercials, everyone already knows what Hotels.com is. But who would have guessed that when they ended up running omnichannel with popular brands that people are already familiar with, the ROI per channel went up by roughly 10%. In other words, even though they were already doing SEO, when they combined multiple channels, they saw all the channels start performing better. So I thought that was so interesting.

1:43We started running experiments with a lot of our clients who aren't doing omni-channel, started doing more omni-channel. And what's funny is with big brands, we saw similar results. Eric, you want to guess what we saw with smaller brands? Okay results. Better results. So the bigger the company, when they're running omni-channel, their ROI per channel would go up in that range, 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%. But with the smaller brands, we started seeing major lifts like 14%, 15%, 16 % better ROIs across all their channels. In essence, the big lesson I learned from Expedia that really changed my mind was I already knew omni-channel work, but I didn't think it would have such an impact for really well-known brands.

2:29And more importantly, it actually has a bigger impact for companies that are starting off versus companies that are already established and have massive revenue streams. You know what's interesting? This reminds me of the podcast advertisers that we have. And so I think about DreamHost. They've been with us for the last couple of years. They're a great sponsor. They're a great company overall. So if you want to get hosting, go to DreamHost, right? But the point is, they've been with us. And I remember them reporting that the brand lift that they've seen overall is, I think it was like, they're saying 5 % to 10 % or so.

3:03So we can't verify those numbers. But the fact of the matter is, they've been with us for the last couple of years. And it's been a great partnership. But then also, when we talk with Shopify, Shopify ran a test with us. And then we're talking about renewing right now. it's like clearly they're trying to take an approach where they're trying to be everywhere Shopify they're sponsoring gamers sometimes I watch Starcraft 2 replays right I'll see like a Shopify logo when they're in the game so you scroll by a thing and you see a Shopify logo and then they're sponsoring podcasts as well they're sponsoring like a lot of events and so that is very much an omni-channel approach and the goal here is you're trying to take a brand approach but you're also really trying to understand where your audience is hanging out because that's marketing 101 and the other one would be Microsoft they just ran a test with us and they're coming to my next event and they're actually doing a little talk about Microsoft as well.

3:48And we're talking to them. It's okay, once they have budget again, are they going to renew or not, right? It just, it has to make sense. But think about it. Microsoft is everywhere. They're a multi-trillion dollar company and they're doing this. So how can you take what the big boys are doing but apply at a smaller scale for whatever it is that you're doing? Yeah. So look, at the end of the day, just because you're set in your marketing ways, And this is the biggest thing I ended up learning over the years as a marketer. Just because you're set in your ways in a specific marketing channel or tactic doesn't mean there's not other ways to do something that could be more effective.

4:25For example, like what big brands are doing, like what Eric's saying or Expedia is doing. And you can also learn from a lot of these young startups that are moving really fast and agile because it just can give you new ideas on how to do something and get more efficiency, which is really well worth it. no matter how the economy is, why wouldn't you want a better ROI in your marketing? It just allows you to scale better. Yep. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, five stars, please. And we will see you tomorrow.