From Dead Ends to Direct Messages: How We Turned Sheraton Colombo's Digital Marketing Around | A Case Study

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Talk About (Ironically)

Right. So here's the thing about phone calls in 2025 - nobody wants them. Not from their mum, not from their bank, and definitely not from a hotel they've never heard of. Yet somehow, this was the strategy that had been running for Sheraton Colombo: paid call campaigns, pushing ads designed to get people to ring up & enquire about stays.

On paper, it sounds sensible enough. You're a luxury hotel. You want leads. You run ads. People make calls. Sorted.

Except they weren't calling. Or rather, they weren't calling in the numbers that made the spend worthwhile. The inquiries weren't converting the way the team had hoped and the cost per meaningful interaction was creeping up.

That's when our team at Echt Social stepped in. And we had some thoughts about the matter.

Reading the Room, and the Data

Before we went anywhere near a new campaign, we asked the obvious question: why isn't this working?

Call campaigns have a fundamental friction problem. Think about the journey you're asking someone to take.

They see an ad. They think, "oh, that looks nice." Then they're expected to stop whatever they're doing, dial a number, wait to be connected, speak to someone, and hope that someone can answer their questions on the spot.

That's a lot of steps between "ooh, fancy hotel" and "yes, I'll book."

Users must go through four steps before they can place a call, during which the user journey is not seamless. This may cause users to drop off before completing the call.

Most people won't bother. Not because they're not interested, but because it's just a bit too much effort when you've got other tabs open and a thousand other things you’d rather be doing instead.

The other issue was audience targeting. The campaigns were casting a pretty wide net, which sounds generous but actually just means you're spending money talking to people who were never going to book a five-star hotel in Colombo anyway. Broad audiences make for broad (read: wasteful) ad spend.

We needed a new approach. Something lower friction. Something that met people where they actually spend their time. 

Enter: WhatsApp.

Why WhatsApp Changed Everything

Sri Lanka is a WhatsApp-first country. It's where people talk to their families, make plans, discuss everything from cricket scores to date nights. It is, without exaggeration, the most natural place to start a conversation.

So when we proposed shifting Sheraton Colombo's campaign strategy from call-based ads to WhatsApp-initiated messaging campaigns, it was just a logical one. 

We weren't asking potential guests to do anything unfamiliar. We were putting the hotel right where the conversation was already happening.

This process provides the added advantage of collecting user data, which can be used for retargeting campaigns and building a community audience pool. The data is collected only from users who have provided their consent through Meta's platform and policies.

The mechanics of it are beautifully simple. Someone sees the ad, taps a button, and they're straight into a WhatsApp chat with the hotel. No dialling & waiting. No "your call is important to us" holding music. Just a direct line to someone who can answer their questions immediately, or follow up at a time that suits them.

But the channel was only half of it. The other half - arguably the more important half - was getting the audience right.

Finding the Right People

This is where we put in some serious work.

Running ads to everyone who might vaguely be interested in hotels is a fast way to burn through the budget without much to show for it. 

We needed to get specific, so here are some questions we asked ourselves;

• Who actually makes the reservations with Sheraton Colombo? 

• What do they look like demographically? 

• What are their interests? 

• What other pages do they follow? 

• When are they most active online?

The result of tightening up the audience was dramatic. Because when your ad reaches fewer but better people, every single metric improves. Your click-through rate goes up. Your cost per conversion comes down. 

And crucially, the people dropping into your WhatsApp aren't time-wasters - they're actual prospects.

It should be noted that we targeted a very specific geographical area, that is around the city of Colombo. We also added A/B testing to identify which creatives are performing best and to identify the best audience that brings better results.

The Numbers That Made Everyone Happy

Let's talk about the results, because they're rather good.

In May 2025 alone, the campaign generated 1063 WhatsApp message inquiries. Over a thousand people reached out directly to Sheraton Colombo through a single month of activity.

The total ad spend to achieve this? $216.28.

That works out to an average cost per message of just $0.20. Twenty cents. For a direct conversation with a potential guest at a luxury five-star property. For context, that is remarkably efficient. 

The average click-through rate came in at 5.45%, which sits well above industry benchmarks for hospitality advertising. For reference, a "good" CTR in paid social for travel and hospitality is generally considered to be somewhere in the 1.5% - 3% range. We were nearly doubling that.

And the best-performing campaign? That'd be the ‘2+1 offer’ campaign that we ran for engagement purposes in May 2025, which on its own generated 511 inquiries from $99.97 in spend, with an even stronger CTR of 6.02%. 

Half the monthly budget. Nearly half the total monthly inquiries. One campaign.

That's not luck. That's what happens when you pair the right offer, with the right audience, on the right platform.

What "Potential Inquiries" Actually Mean

It's worth taking a moment here to explain why we're calling these "potential inquiries" rather than just "leads" or "bookings."

A WhatsApp message is the start of a conversation, not the end of one. When someone messages the hotel, they're expressing genuine interest. They want to know about room availability, rates, packages, the pool situation, whether the restaurant does a decent Sunday buffet. These are interested people who have voluntarily initiated contact.

What happens next depends on how that conversation is handled. The campaign's job is to get the right people through the door. The hotel team's job is to convert those conversations into actual bookings. With over a thousand warm conversations generated in a single month, the opportunity is very much there.

The shift from call campaigns to WhatsApp didn't just change the volume of inquiries. It also changed the quality of the interactions. 

People who use WhatsApp text comfortably at their own pace. They can ask questions, receive information, and take their time to decide. It's a lower-pressure environment for the guest, which paradoxically tends to make them more likely to convert, not less.

What We Learnt (And What Comes Next)

There are a few things this campaign reminded us of - useful lessons for anyone running hospitality marketing in a mobile-first market.

1. Platform matters more than you think. 

It's not enough to have a great creative and a decent offer. If you're putting it in front of people in a way that creates friction, you're fighting an uphill battle before the first click. Meet people where they are.

2. Audience precision is a force multiplier. 

Every dollar spent on a well-defined audience goes further than the same dollar spent on a broad one. Narrowing your targeting might feel counterintuitive (fewer people seeing your ad!), but the quality difference more than compensates.

3. Simplicity is a converting point. 

The campaigns that performed best weren't complicated. Clear offer. Clear call to action. Clear path to a conversation. The 2+1 Offer campaign worked because it was easy to understand and easy to respond to.

4. Test, learn, and iterate. 

The best-performing campaign wasn't the first one. It was the result of running, watching, adjusting, and improving. Campaign 02 existed because Campaign 01 gave us data.

Going forward, the plan is to continue refining the audience segments, test new creative angles, and look at how the WhatsApp conversations themselves can be structured to make the hotel team's follow-up more efficient and effective.

One month in, over a thousand conversations started, cost per message under a quarter dollar, and a CTR that most digital marketers would frame on their wall.

Not bad for ditching the phone.

Want your business to reach the same numbers and produce good results? We’re sure we can help - reach out to us today!