Stories with The Luxury Collection are best told from our travelers themselves. Each unique perspective brings depth and color to our hotels and destinations, and we wanted to showcase these travel journeys on our social channels.
Our objectives for this campaign were to:
The oversaturation of influencer marketing on social media posed a challenge — How could we best share these unique travel perspectives in the most authentic and inspiring way while also staying true to the values of our brand and provide a unique point of view that would resonate with our audience?
We developed our Tastemaker strategy as a way to convey the richness of our brand while also satisfying current content consumption trends, partnering with influential voices within a particular niche — such as artists, stylists, entrepreneurs, chefs, etc. — to share their travel experiences through their unique lenses.
These Tastemakers differed from more main-stream influencers. While their followings were often smaller, they had high credibility and authenticity within their spheres of influence. We chose individuals from fields that we know overlap with our audiences’ interests — fine art, design, storytelling, etc. Not only did we reach new audiences with these shared interests, but our current audience also recognized the credibility of these more niche voices.
To ensure we were resonating with our audience’s interests, we encouraged each Tastemaker to share their travel experiences in their authentic voice. By doing so, we allowed for a depth of storytelling that went beyond sponsored posts, reaching audiences that also wanted transformative travel experiences.
We asked each Tastemaker to provide unedited footage from their trips (filmed on their phones), which we used to create Reels about their travels in a first-person POV style to share on our channels.
We also interviewed select Tastemakers, sharing their perspective on travel through the lens of their craft in articles published on theluxurycollection.com, which served as the main drive-to destination for our paid social distribution campaign.
On Instagram Stories, we introduced each Tastemakers’ lens on travel through a collection of images & videos from their travels, incorporating pull-quotes from their editorial interview.
We saw an earned reach of 237.9M OTS across this campaign, allowing us to tap into the audiences of each Tastemaker. Select Tastemakers not only ranked in the Top 10 for Earned Engagement for The Luxury Collection, but across Marriott International’s 8 luxury brands overall.
We were also able to generate owned content for our channels, reaching 21.9M viewers to date. Across owned and paid channels, this campaign garnered over 6.6M engagements with an impressive 30% engagement rate, proving this content resonates well with our audience. Viewers were also interested in reading more, and the content amassed 3.5K link clicks to the accompanying editorial.
As we continue to modernize our content and create Reels that are mobile-first in design and messaging, we are excited to keep diving into current content trends, modifying our approach to meet viewers’ interests, while staying true to our luxury brand positioning.
