Marketing Experiments looks at how Hilton Worldwide effectively personalized its marketing messages.  The study compared the clickthrough rates of personality-matched Facebook ads to the benchmark clickthrough rate in the traveling category. Sandra Matz and Vesselin Popov, researchers at the Psychometrics Centre, Cambridge University, collaborated with Grayling UK, an agency working with Hilton Worldwide, to study the effectiveness of personality-based tailored marketing campaigns for the Hilton HHonors Summer and Winter Sales.

The Study Steps

1. The team used existing data from Facebook’s myPersonality app to identify personality traits of people who “liked” Hilton pages, and compared those traits to the traits of the “travelling” category audience in general. a. The Hilton audience’s characteristic traits were low conservatism/traditionalism and competitiveness/preference for working alone, and high extraversion (being engaged with the outside world) and conscientiousness (organized and hard working). b. To understand their audience in more detail, the team distributed a link to a 50-item online personality assessment to 215 participants and gave them feedback.

    

2. The team prepared 10 different ads based on personality keywords, and showed them to customers who were either matched with the ad based on their personality (high customer conscientiousness — conscientious ad) or mismatched (e.g., low customer conscientiousness — conscientious ad). The hypothesis was that matched ads would have higher clickthrough rates and yield higher revenue.

Results

The clickthrough rates for personality-matched ads were at least twice as high as the travel industry benchmark — the lowest performing segment had an average CTR of .17 compared to the travel industry benchmark for Facebook advertising, .08%. Personality-matched ads were also shared on Facebook more than three times as often — 34.32% as compared to 9.22% benchmark. Perhaps not surprisingly, personality-matched ads are more engaging and personal, and they are more effective in terms of clickthrough rates. However, personality matched ads are more cost-effective for less obvious reasons, too, explains Vesselin Popov, one of the study authors. Read full article on Marketing Experiments Blog

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