Our Marketing, Your Success
At the heart of our successful relationship with our property Owners is our marketing ability – in essence we are a marketing company, not a property company.
Traditional Advertising
Even in the internet age, there is a place for good advertising in the traditional media. The secret of our success in newspaper and magazine advertising is getting recognized in a crowded space whilst still conveying the ‘quality’ message. We use striking visuals and imaginative design to mark ourselves out from the crowd and to suggest that our portfolio is ‘a cut above the rest’. However, science runs alongside the creativity – every bit of our marketing expenditure has to pass the ‘cost per booking’ test. We monitor all our advertising and track bookings back to their source media. However well matched the readership of a particular publication may appear to be, if the cost per booking is too high, we will drop that publication and assign the budget to more effective media.
Brochure
We take great pride in our brochure and hope you will find that to be well founded. Please click here to send for one. It is split into two halves; the Directory is designed to describe our portfolio of 600 properties in the most alluring, informative way; the other half is an attractive ‘coffee-table piece’ which entices the reader to take a break with us and, at the same time, builds our brand. Our aim is not to have to tell potential customers about our high standards, but to let them discern that from the quality of our brochure. We want them to trust us to put the same care and attention into our property selection process as we put into the brochure.
www.classic.co.uk
As our domain name suggests, we were early adopters of the Web to promote our business. Our Web site is designed to make the most of the two major advantages of operating on-line; you can convey more information than on paper and it is interactive. We have therefore devoted a great deal of time to giving customers as much information about each property as possible and into developing a comprehensive search that allows the customer to select the things that are important to them when looking for a holiday home. Other features include additional information about the area surrounding the property and the ability to register for email alerts about special offers and new properties entering the portfolio. The majority of bookings are now taken on-line, so we do seem to be getting it right.
On-line Marketing
The search engines are the heart of our on-line marketing activity which can be divided into two parts; the free listings (usually on the left in the search window) and the sponsored links (which are usually in the first few slots and on the right of the results windows). Our success in the first category is a result of the time and effort that we have put into engineering our site to be as well regarded by the search engines as possible, and therefore we appear towards the top of the list of results returned for the most frequently used search terms. Our ranking in the second category, the sponsored links (often called ‘pay-per-click’), is determined by the price we are prepared to pay. We were one of the first in our sector to use ‘pay-per-click’ marketing and we are now experienced operators with a comprehensive strategy for bidding on over 500 key phrases, each with variable timings, content and landing pages on our Web site.
Database Marketing
Previous customers are our best source of bookings; they provide us with half our bookings each year. Their loyalty is a tribute to the high standard of the properties in our portfolio, however we are not complacent about that loyalty – it needs to be nurtured. It is no longer enough just to drop a brochure through the letterbox each year, so we have a carefully targeted schedule of direct mail and email timed to hit at key points in the year. We make each mailing as personal as possible to avoid it being dismissed as junk mail. This goes beyond just addressing the guest by name; for example, one of our mailings showed a picture of the last property the customer stayed in.
Our approach to our marketing is creative and imaginative, but it is as much science as art and every penny spent is closely monitored to ensure that we get the maximum number of bookings from our marketing budget.
| 