How a full funnel marketing strategy helped Booking.com win on YouTube

To be clear, we have never been accused of being sexy or lit.

May I?

We're definitely not lit.

Our branding strategy is really laddering up to our overall mission, which is making it easier for everyone to experience the world.

And we as a brand are really focusing on the booking experience, so really making sure that it is as easy as possible for people to book their stay.

The main objective of our campaign was to build brand awareness but then also bring them to our website.

We wanted to launch Booking.yeah in the US and make a big splash, and in order to do that we were looking for something to really accelerate that launch and that's where the Super Bowl came into play.

The Super Bowl is not just about buying a spot on TV, it’s really the whole campaign that comes together. So, for us it was the teaser, it was a giveaway, and it was launching the spot early online before to really leverage the pregame interest.

Then, for Booking.yeah that was quickly followed up after the Super Bowl, and it was a multi-channel campaign across digital, online, offline.

YouTube was the right place for us to host our Super Bowl spot because it gave us a place where we could drive all users if they had seen our paid, owned, or earned activities, and it was also a place where we could host a range of other content that really complemented the work that we were doing on the TV spot.

So, we had some great results within YouTube. We actually delivered up to 54% lift in ad recall and up to 22% in brand awareness lift.

So, for our YouTube campaign we used a combination of Video for Reach, Video for Action, and YouTube Select. For our core campaign, on average we saw a 6% lift in site visitors.

And this is something we're going to keep testing and learning, and look to scale Booking.yeah across the world, starting with the continuation of the work in the US and then also taking it to EMEA as well.

Booking.yeah is definitely here to stay. We are now looking into how we can leverage this campaign within the channels that we are live but then also starting to plan for next year, so we are now looking into the emotional and functional needs of our consumers and see how we can play a role within that.