The W Hotels brand is known for its bold and dynamic social media presence. In 2022, we relaunched our social media to reflect the brand's updated image and focus. This process involved collaboration between the global brand team, hotels worldwide, content creators, and influencers.
As part of our updated content strategy, we sought opportunities to amplify our updated social media with new and influential voices that could offer a diverse perspective on travel and reach the updated W Hotels audience. The result was Travel Interviews, deep, funny, and enlightening conversations featuring notable personalities like Noah Beck, Simi & Haze, Kimberly Drew, Tokimonsta, and Michaela Jae Rodriguez at our hotels across the globe.
When strategizing our social media relaunch, we focused on five key initiatives: creating a new content strategy, modernizing our look and feel, shooting new content across the globe, testing new content formats to reflect a changing social landscape, and working with new partners and tastemakers that reflect our target consumer.
From there, we envisioned a video series with influential personalities that highlighted the uniqueness of various W Hotels properties. With these inputs, Suite Life, a series that interviews tastemakers about all things travel while showcasing the design of our hotels, and Pillow Talk, a series that interviews notable personalities as they wake up in a W Hotels suite was born.
For Suite Talk, we initially partnered with Architectural Digest to feature talent that shared our passion points and identify locations that highlighted the unique W Hotels design aesthetic. Through this series, we interviewed award-winning actress and activist Michaela Jae Rodriguez at W South Beach, DJ duo and beauty gurus Simi & Haze at W Nashville, curator and writer Kimberly Drew at W Montréal, and DJ and producer Tokimonsta at W Aspen. For Pillow Talk, we started by interviewing Noah Beck at W London, showcasing him eating breakfast and preparing for a day out in the city.
Given the success of these series at driving engagement and telling a deeper story of travel, we have invested in making more Travel Interviews to be part of our content strategy year-round, featuring Tefi Pessoa, LP Giobbi, and many more.
The result is Travel Interviews that balance humor, heart, design, and inspiration. Viewers both can feel like they are touring suites at our hotels while engaging in intimate conversations with Michaela, Simi, Haze, Kimberly, Tokimonsta, and Noah Beck, sharing their accounts of Emmy nominations, DJ sets on the road, mezcal cocktails, and travel hacks.
We launched this series across Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter– a combination of our owned channels, as well as Architectural Digest and talent channels– running a paid media campaign across all platforms to reach our target audience.
To date, Suite Talk has amassed 3.2M Youtube views, 3.4M impressions across W and talent social channels, 64k owned engagements, an engagement rate of 29%, and coverage in Architectural Digest. Pillow Talk has amassed 1.3M impressions, 403K engagements, and a 32% engagement rate.
The success of this Travel Interviews has inspired us to continue producing YouTube content and to create more personality-driven interview series for YouTube and Instagram, including Local Check-In, a series interviewing hotel partners across the globe, and Sound Check, a series interviewing our musical partners as they perform. Our brand channels now share unique perspectives on travel through connectors and tastemakers in the W Hotels community.
