The Charleston Place set out to be the home of the holidays in Charleston, South Carolina. The hotel’s driving message is open hands, open heart and their central location in the heart of historic downtown Charleston offers them the unique chance to become a gathering place for the community. For the 2023 festive season they held more than 27 unique happenings including nightly live snowfall and had more Christmas trees installed than the White House! Our goal was to translate this festive wonderland onto their social channels and build excitement, not only for hotel guests but also within the community. We also hoped to use this festive immersion to drive direct revenue for the holiday season and beyond through a conversion ads strategy.
Our first challenge was to make the hotel’s Instagram page feel as immersive as the real life experience of stepping on property. The theme this year was inspired by The Nutcracker and the hotel was transformed into the magical, mythical dream-like state of dancing Sugar Plum fairies, The Waltz of Flowers and a place where imagination thrives. 162 Christmas trees were installed alongside 72 wreaths, a custom built 41-foot tree, 400,000 holiday lights, and more than 20,000 ornaments. There were live snowfalls multiple times per evening as well as a Nutcracker workshop and a Snowflake March, led by the Dance Conservatory of Charleston. In short, it was a magical and immersive experience, and one that we wanted to convey digitally.
We began our content in mid October with a tease, followed by a hotel produced “commercial” introducing the Nutcracker theme. We then teased holiday content building up to the months of November and December where we immersed the Instagram feed in a content flood of festivity. Every post highlighted the festive events from broad highlights of the planned festivities to detailed shots of the design. We published content daily, varying from photo to carousel to Reel formats and included multiple stories per week, all building this visual world around holidays at The Charleston Place. For the last nine days until Christmas we did a countdown on Instagram, highlighting the onsite experience through immersive Reels, and building excitement as we counted down the last opportunities to celebrate in person.
On top of our organic efforts we added in a paid strategy on Meta. This involved a full-funnel campaign: boosting posts for awareness and engagement, website traffic campaign, and a conversion campaign. All content leveraged was video-centric highlighting the immersive holiday experience. For the conversion campaign, we retargeted the website visitors driven from our traffic campaign and from organic social, adding in the hotel holiday package as the offer to drive bookings.
Our paid and organic results results generated 1,001,565 impressions, a reach of 839,064, and 84 direct conversions at a ROAS of 16.9, as well as a 464% revenue increase YOY. We created over 60 pieces of festive content during this period and sold out nearly every single event on property.
