This year, we set out to deepen storytelling on our channels in a way befitting The Luxury Collection. We knew that beautiful photos and videos were not enough to convey the richness of this brand, and we needed a strategy that would allow us to expand upon the experiences available with our hotels.
At the same time, amidst so much change in the social landscape, we also set out to try new things and shift our content strategy to satisfy current content consumption trends and the emergence of new social formats.
Our objectives for this strategy were to:
In 2022, we developed a content strategy that expanded our storytelling capabilities on Instagram. Instead of posting a singular post about one hotel or aspirational experience, we grouped our posts according to content themes — three posts per theme. Each post could stand alone, so that our audience would understand the context of what was being shared, but the additional posts allowed us the opportunity to dive deeper into the featured hotel and destination or show additional experiences that were similar — giving interested individuals an opportunity to explore more on our feed.
We also expanded upon this strategy by incorporating Reels in a style that stayed true to brand storytelling pillars but reached viewers how and where they prefer to consume content. We developed new content franchises, creating Reels that dive deeper into our hotels’ rich stories and histories as well as highlight unique experiences available with The Luxury Collection.
We utilized Instagram Stories to share “Destination Guides,” showcasing experiences in each destination and highlighting how our hotels seamlessly weave into these experiences. We also designed templates for Tastemaker partnerships and for press, incorporating quotes and images to increase interest and ultimately drive clicks to each editorial article.
In order to more fully tell these stories, we crafted editorial content on theluxurycollection.com, which served as our drive-to destination for our paid social distribution campaign. From interviews with Tastemakers to deep-dives on destination experiences, we increased our storytelling capabilities through these articles, providing our audience an opportunity to learn more about our hotels and destinations.
The Luxury Collection audience and consumer are curious about the unknown, always willing to explore and discover something new. Our new strategy resonates well with our audience and has increased their interest and excitement to visit The Luxury Collection hotels by increasing their knowledge of our hotels and destinations. By venturing beyond simple aspirational content and expanding upon these stories, we’ve continued to position The Luxury Collection as the leader in experiential luxury travel.
Since our strategy shift, we have increased our followers by over 26%, showing that this type of content is resonating well with luxury travelers. In addition, our total engagement rate increased to 19.1%, an over 520% difference from previous years. When linking to our editorial content, we also increased our click-through rate by +1%, proving our audience is interested in learning more about the content we share on social channels.
By implementing an always-on paid amplification strategy, we also accrued 42.5M engagements and 222M impressions.
Over the course of the year, we conducted a brand lift study on social channels. After implementing our content strategy, we saw a +2.9 point lift in brand awareness for The Luxury Collection — 1.8x higher than the travel benchmark.
