Our Rituals are an integral part of the St. Regis brand and are at the heart of an exquisite stay. Today, we celebrate four rituals — Sabrage as part of the Evening Ritual, the Bloody Mary Ritual, the Afternoon Tea Ritual, and Midnight Supper — each a modern articulation of timeless tradition and an opportunity to invite guests to experience our enduring legacy.
In 2019 we wanted to amplify our Rituals and drive engagement around timeless traditions to a new luxury audience of millennials and social-first travelers. We realized that although we could take the tested approach to promote Rituals-themed content to a targeted audience we were looking to capture a more personalized interest so we began to search for the right Influencer to elevate our messaging.
Our goal was to capitalize on an influencer’s personalized reach to drive an earned audience back to our pages and channels in a way we would never be able to reach otherwise. And then to promote content to that new owned audience that we already touched to increase recall of our traditions and create interest in experience these exquisite rituals for themselves.
The first part of our strategy was in determining the St. Regis hotels whose presentation of their rituals would be ideal content for an influencer’s Instagram feed. We focused on North American locations that gave us room to expand to international properties once we had determined the campaign was successful.
In the end we chose our hotels in San Francisco, Bahai Beach, and Aspen to represent this pilot.
Next we needed to find the right influencer that aligned with the brand's aesthetic and standards. With the ever evolving social media landscape and the growing concerns over authenticity across the channel, the brand went through an intensive auditing process to vet the perfect pick for this tour. We set out to work with an influencer that not only represented our brand, but was able to speak to the young luminary audience.
In Q4, we partnered with fashion blogger Annabelle Fleur of @annabellefleur, who has a reach of 1.5 million subscribers across her channels, to amplify our Timeless Rituals at those properties as part of the Rituals Roadtrip, culminating in her participation of the last ritual - the Midnight Supper- while attending one of our most prestigious events of the year, Snow Polo at St Regis. Aspen.
As Annabelle toured each property over the course of a few weeks, she shared high quality, elegantly articulated stories about each hotel and the rituals she experienced. Although she was only required to post a few pieces of content at each destination she shared above and beyond her contract generating even greater reach to that young luminary, social-first, luxury consumer, driving them back to our owned channels and pages.
Annabelle tagged us a paid partner in beautiful moments from each stop on Instagram and IG Stories generating over 1M+ targeted Organic Impressions and over 100k Engagements to that new audience we were cultivating and recapturing through our paid placements.
At Snow Polo alone, Annabelle posted about those branded moments with us at one of our hotels, during one of our signature events, generating 500k Impressions and 36k Engagements.
In addition to the earned awareness from her blog posts and Instagram Stories we also promoted content about her trip to that new audience with great success. We highlighted her adventures from San Francisco, Bahia Beach, and Aspen on FB & IG to great fanfare. We reached 17.7M Paid Impressions and 800K Engagements at one of the most efficient CPMs of 2019.
Between Annabelle’s stories and our paid amplification the Rituals Roadtrip was one of the most successful campaigns of 2019 for St. Regis Hotels & Resorts and we are already planning what Year 2 of this exquisite tour will bring.
