Background

Infinity Rugby is an Official Travel Authorised Sub Agent for Rugby World Cup France 2023. They have partnered with Norwegian Cruise Lines and chartered a cruise ship for the 6-week duration of the Rugby World Cup and aim to deliver a truly remarkable and EPIC experience to customers and fans alike.? We began working with Infinity Sports Travel in early 2022 and have provided several services, including website design, marketing, reporting and paid ads across several channels as well as covering other areas, including; ?press coverage and outreach, email marketing, campaign creation, out of home marketing (radio, magazine ads, digital screens, billboards, leaflets, petrol pumps, phone boxes, bus ads)

Situation

Ahead of Rugby World Cup 2023, Infinity Sports Travel required a new website to host their booking platform for customers and agents to view and book their once-in-a-lifetime holidays. ?Once the website was live, they also required our services to implement their launch campaign due to the small nature of their team, which consisted of multiple paid adverts, press releases and reporting.

Solutions and Results

Website

We received the brief for the platform to be fresh, interactive and engaging. Something that excites the users and entices them to book a holiday. Not only did the site need to host basic information such as an about and blog section, but the holidays offered by Infinity Sports Travel needed to be presented in a tidy and informative fashion, clearly detailing each cruise itinerary. Our web design team put together a detailed site map for the team at Infinity Sports Travel to review the site's individual look and feel before providing the customer with a prototype to enable us to conduct our first round of testing before we went into the development phase. During the development phase, we ensured the site was device responsive, fast-loading, and efficient. The client also needed to engage with their booking provider to ensure it was compatible and linked to the relevant pages.

Google Ads  - French & US Launch Campaign

With the website live, Infinity Sports Travel was ready to launch its unique product offering and initially chose to target the French and US markets.

We conducted a series of research through Google Trends and Google Ads Keyword planner to put together a proposal for a Google Ads campaign in these key territories, with a Facebook campaign to support.

Before commencing activity in France, we engaged with a translation company to ensure that all adverts were grammatically correct to French natives. Once the translation was received, we built the framework for the ads and monitored their performance daily to ensure we were reaching the desired audience and driving traffic to the website.

Over an initial 10-week period, the ads performed exceptionally well, particularly on the Google search network and received 118,000 impressions and drove 3,660 people to the website, resulting in a 3.09% click-through rate, with 36.67% of those people converting.

Google Ads  - ?Portuguese Campaign:

Given this was a new product launch timed around the Autumn Rugby Internationals, the results were excellent; therefore, Portugal was added to the targeting when they qualified for the World Cup towards the end of 2022.

We once again used Google Trends and Keyword Planner to help us identify the search terms which Portuguese natives and residents were using once they qualified for the Rugby World Cup and put together a campaign plan to reach in-market audiences who were looking at ticket and accommodation packages. 

The advert copy once again was translated by our professional translator to ensure they were grammatically correct, which allowed us to reach 84,600 people in a three-week period and drive 1,560 website visits which resulted in a 10.76% conversion rate.

Meta Ads - UK Accommodation Only Campaign

As well as offering holidays, including accommodation and rugby tickets, Infinity Sports Travel offers a cruise-only package for rugby enthusiasts who have already purchased their tickets. We, therefore, launched an accommodation-only campaign at the start of 2023 on Google and Facebook within the UK.The campaign targeted rugby enthusiasts aged 35+ who we believed to be most likely to book and travel to the Rugby World Cup. During a three-week period, the Facebook adverts alone reached 104,365 individuals and drove 2,262 people to the website.

Press Coverage: 

During the UK accommodation-only campaign, we wrote and sent a press release to UK-based journalists covering travel and rugby, highlighting the unique and exciting product offering from Infinity Sports Travel.The release was picked up by two national publications at the end of February 2023 and featured in the Mail on Sunday newspaper and online cruise column, which has an estimated reach of 10 million people.We were also thrilled to see the release covered within the rugby section of the Metro which distributes approximately 20 million copies daily.