About City Lodge Hotel Group
City Lodge Hotel Group (CLHG) is a South African-born hospitality brand offering four distinct sub-brands that provide customers with accommodation comforts at price points they can afford. These start at Road Lodge, with its basically brilliant rooms and amenities, all the way up to the premier Courtyard Hotels with their magnificent luxury studio suites. CLHG provides a range of ways for guests to experience unbelievable service and exceptional accommodation at different price points. CLHG has also extended their footprint further into the African continent, with additional properties in Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia.
The Challenge
To build and execute a City Lodge Hotel Group summer campaign with the aim of increasing occupancy and bookings to pre-pandemic levels.
Key Insight
Due to inflation, high fuel costs, and rising costs of living, there has been less money to go around.
The Campaign
Summer is an exciting and fun time of the year. We wanted to create a bright and colourful logo that reflects this. The logo shouldn’t just reflect the aspect of “skimping” but rather convey the awesome getaways that the CLHG brand can give each person.
Introducing “Don’t skimp on your Summer.”
Coming up with an excellent summer campaign idea and logo was only the start of Digitlab’s involvement. CLHG was counting on us to get the word out in the lead up to the summer holidays. The challenge was to get occupancy rates back to pre-COVID levels, but also to spread the good news that CLHG was offering much more than just a great discount on summer holiday accommodation.
Extra offerings for the Summer 2022/2023 season included:
- Enhanced food and beverage offerings
- Free breakfasts and drink vouchers
- Free beach towels and bat & ball sets
Targeting
CLHG wanted to reach two types of South African holidaymakers:
- Those who prefer to visit the coast for a holiday
- Those who prefer to go inland for holidays
This meant creating different promotional content to speak to each of these audiences, and careful PPC targeting to reach these audiences individually.
The media plan, starting in October 2022 and ending on 10 January 2023, looked at gaining brand awareness and lead generation. Primary focus of the campaign was lead generation (online bookings) with a secondary objective being awareness. This campaign ran on the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Google to generate leads and awareness.
Execution
Animations
Our summer animations leveraged colour, motion and music to get the homestuck unstuck, the boombox turned up, and the summer suitcases piled up.
Animations
Social posts
YouTube Video Ads
Without a little encouragement, YouTube viewers might forget what season it is! Our animation content on YouTube helped reach an untapped holiday seam – aiming to get those eyes off screen, unhooked and booked!
YouTube Ads
Carousel
