For more than 115 years, The Luxury Collection has taken pride in being the Destination Authority in each of its locations, curating the world’s most enriching and desirable immersive experiences for cultured travelers. Our hotels unlock transformational discoveries in each locale, allowing our guests to travel deeper and explore like a local.
With this mission serving as our foundation and guiding our strategy, we developed a series of content franchises for Instagram to bring our brand positioning to life. How we shared these stories was heavily informed by current consumption trends on Instagram, and we tailored each concept to the interests of our audience target—Explorers and Collectors. With these franchises, we also leaned into the growing desire on social media for “edutainment”—blending entertaining and educational content.
Objectives:
When creating our strategy, we sought to answer a few questions:
The answer to these questions was multi-faceted. We created storytelling funnels that allowed us to showcase our hotels in a variety of ways, ensuring our content portrayed the diversity of our hotel portfolio.
We developed a series of content franchises to showcase our hotels and destinations, further establishing the brand as the Destination Authority.
By tapping into the expertise of our tastemakers, local artisans, and hotels, we were able to overcome these challenges and share the stories of our destinations in an interesting way.
By defining these content franchises, we are able to share the stories of our hotels in a social-first and aspirational way, increasing interest and excitement among our audience.
Our primary goal for this strategy was to increase high-value engagements, such as shares and saves, as these metrics measure social relevancy (shares) and intent (saves). Compared to last year, we are pleased to see an average of 2.6x higher shares and 2.7x higher saves on our content. Further, our average engagement rate on Instagram for the year is 8.5%, 38% higher than last year and 21x higher than the industry average. Across all engagement metrics, we saw an impressive increase, proving the efficacy of our content strategy.
We also increased our organic reach by 58% YoY—evidence that our content is resonating with viewers beyond our paid strategy efforts. For our video content, we saw an average view-through rate of 9.7%, an impressive 27% higher than last year’s rate, indicating that viewers are intrigued and compelled by the content.
Through this strategy, we also measured $11.7M in attributable revenue from bookings made after viewing our content—a 15% increase YoY.
Over the course of the year, we conducted a brand lift study to measure the impact of our content strategy efforts. We saw a notable increase in brand awareness each quarter, with an average +5.8p point lift for the year—2.8x above the benchmark. Additionally, we increased brand favorability +2.3p (2.5x above benchmark). Both of these increases indicate our content strategy is successful in driving awareness and increasing perception of the brand.
