La Quinta Parnell Case Study

Educating the market: a first-of-its-kind investment opportunity

Safari Group’s hotel chain, La Quinta by Wyndham, enlisted Social Garden to advertise their new hotel units in Parnell, Auckland.

As a unique investment opportunity — the first of its kind run by a property developer for the general public — it was our first time running a product campaign in this niche. The hotel units are commercial freehold properties that come with a lease in place, and are already tenanted by the hotel operator (La Quinta). Unit owners are guaranteed a monthly income, and over 54 units are being sold in the sought-after Parnell location.

We identified a need for an intensive testing and learning phase at the early stages of the campaign to properly understand trends in the market, given this was a unique campaign in our portfolio. Through this, we discovered a lack of Australian and New Zealand audience knowledge in hotel unit investment opportunities of this kind, and a waning trust in the property market due to increasing interest rates and potentially ongoing tourism restrictions post-pandemic.

77%

Profiling rate

5.31%

Conversion rate

Leads generated as of October 2022

Services

LeadTech
LeadConvert

The Team
Georgie Millard: Account Manager
Kaan Gude: Campaign Manager/Head of Advertising
Gemma Lawrence: Senior Copywriter
Dana Wu: Designer

Strategy-driven brand awareness

Working closely with the Safari Group team, we identified the target audience as men and women between the ages of 40 and 60 with a large disposable income and GST registered in New Zealand. To target them, we utilised the key selling points for La Quinta Parnell hotel units to provide as much valuable information as possible in our advertisements.

From there, we:
• Educated the market on key benefits of hotel unit investment
• Included FAQs on the landing page to address common audience concerns
• Centred investment value statistics in our advertising alongside key drawcards such as location and amenities
• Identified best-performing ads and landing page elements over the first few weeks of the campaign in order to optimise and refine the copy for best results — a crucial early learning phase in a new campaign like this
• Found that ads containing keywords such as ‘invest’ and ‘investors’ tended to result in the highest conversions

Channeling conversions

We used two channels — Facebook and Google — for La Quinta Parnell’s campaign.

The Facebook ads were responsible for building brand awareness for prospecting leads who are unfamiliar with hotel units or investing in general. We created a range of static, carousel and video ads speaking specifically to the key selling points and investment value of product.

Our Google campaign utilised a range of branded and non-branded keywords to ensure that the La Quinta name was appearing alongside as many possible Auckland-based investment property searches.

The results?

The first month of the campaign saw extremely strong results, where we hit our monthly leads target within 10 days of going live:

1.12%

Click-through-rate

7.47%

Conversion rate

81.82%

Profiling rate

Due to a tough property market with persistently increasing interest rates, these results slowly declining as the campaign continues to progress. However, we have maintained a steady and above-average conversion rate across the campaign, which indicates that our landing page is resonating with our target audience.

A strong overall profiling rate of 77% so far has helped paint a clear picture to La Quinta of their target audience, including their budget, existing investment properties, and what specific product (hotel room, hotel studio, or 1-bedroom apartment) they are interested in.

We’re really pleased to report that at the 5-month mark of the campaign, La Quinta generated their first sale from a Social Garden Facebook lead!

“From a campaign perspective, the key was focusing on the most qualified audience. It was more effective to address the needs of a target audience that is already familiar with the product category of hotel investments, rather than educating those who are unaware. For this key audience, we promoted the obvious financial appeal of La Quinta, as well as the easy maintenance of this opportunity for investors.”

-Kaan Güde,
Head of Advertising