Hilton Ad Campaign
Making Hilton like Home
How can my team and I target Hilton Hotels' “Next Generation of Travelers” in a USA regional-focused advertising campaign? This 12-month campaign would require my team and I to tactically spread a $7,000,000 budget and define what psychographics would emphasize. With this broad of a company, demographic, and market a key challenge we had was determining our designated market areas. After we would need to align this with our target market and the specific focuses we were conveying to consumers. Our client requested 35% of our ad spending be from digital media, which includes paid social media strategies. At least 15 key terms had to be prioritized in Search Engine Marketing practices with a distinguished ad cap and justification. Additionally, we needed at least 5 out-of-home tactics and 4 print tactics to have a media plan that met our objectives.
Hilton is a leading global hospitality company with over a billion dollars in equity, 160,000 employees, 7,000 properties, and established in 122 countries and territories. To gain a better understanding of Hiltons distinguished brand and rich history we started our campaign with research:
Grasped who we were representing and where the gap in their market was.
Found a lack of social media and digital strategies, a concern in relating to the next generation of travelers.
Noted the campaigns target market would have less income from Hilton’s current customer basis, aligning best with the branding of Hilton Garden Inn
Analyzing the brand opportunity index conveyed the Southeastern United States as the greatest growth potential for the client.
Research and Ideation
Budgeting and Logistics
Now that we have determined the who and where of this campaign the next steps require answering the how and when. This would be done by developing 5 key overarching goals we had. That being increasing reservations, social media presence, brand awareness, client appearance, and prioritizing event accommodations. Through paid, earned, shared, and owned media we developed tactics that correlated to the interests of the target market. To cover the 12-month time frame our media not only had to strategically relate to consumers but also be relevant to the time we would decide to publish. We determined this by placing media specific to aspects such as football season or spring break first and filling in the remainder of the months with our more general content, to keep relevancy year-round. Ensuring we stayed within our client’s budget required us to go through each month to distinguish the quantity of each media tactic we wanted and could afford. This was a very tedious process accounting for every key performance indicator, influencer rating, and cost per branded material unit.
After planning our whole campaign it was time to translate our vision to our client. To successfully communicate our findings, we would have to:
Combine our written work with visual and verbal communication.
Develop charts and graphs for our media planning and budgeting.
Produce mockups for our tactics including events, billboards, and print advertisements.
Create a campaign booklet organizing our work into defined sections and developing a professional design that aligned with Hiltons Branding.