While Marriott Bonvoy's portfolio of hotels are renowned for hospitality expertise, a credible partner in the weddings industry would serve to elevate our hotels and resorts' robust wedding offerings while captivating a new audience. In the pursuit to capture the hearts and minds of couples planning their weddings, it became clear there was a tremendous opportunity to curate content that showcases breathtaking and diverse weddings hosted by our hotels and resorts.
While many partners were considered, the ethos of Carats & Cake, an emerging leader in the luxury wedding segment, stood out. Carats & Cake connects its highly engaged community with top venues, hotels and resorts and industry professionals via beautiful content and storytelling.
Our goals with this unprecedented partnership are to:
• Merchandise real weddings hosted by incredible Marriott Bonvoy hotels and resorts across the US & Canada
• Generate awareness for participating hotels & resorts by leveraging Carats & Cake's multi-tiered marketing approach to showcase weddings
• Drive web traffic to the custom Marriott Bonvoy landing page and MI's weddings co-op landing page
• Drive engagement among the target audience with compelling content including photography, video and authentic stories from couples and wedding planners
• Reach a new younger, diverse audience by leveraging Carats & Cake's strong, engaged social media community.
The Marriott Bonvoy team worked hand in hand with Carats & Cake to develop a robust content strategy to meet the campaign’s goals and objectives. In addition to tapping into the targeted audience of engaged couples within Carats & Cake’s digital ecosystem, the team at MB faced one huge barrier to optimizing its wedding content: stringent internal requirements regarding asset usage, including photography and videography. While necessary for a large hospitality company to maintain brand standards and meet legal requirements, they created unique challenges for hotels to source fresh, “real wedding” content. Hotels host hundreds of events each year and with still limited resources post-pandemic, chasing down usage rights from vendors, photographers and engaged couples willing to share their experiences is a low priority.
With expert assistance and additional resources from Carats & Cake, the collaborative team was able to contact multiple vendors and photographers for every wedding held in participating properties and attain stunning photography and video assets for the microsite in addition to the proper usage rights and permission. Carats & Cake worked closely with each of the hotels and resorts to build out and update their listings.
Once the listings and microsite were built, the next step for the team was to begin creating editorial content featuring authentic, “real weddings” that drove traffic back to the site, along with promotion on Carats & Cake’s social channels to further amplify reach and engagement. Channels included Instagram in-feed and story posts/reels, Facebook organic and boosted posts, Pinterest boards and pins along with TikTok content. These social channels were crucial in reaching this new audience that previously might not have considered hosting their wedding and reception at a Marriott Bonvoy hotel or resort. And participating hotels have exposure and tools to better sell their space that will live on for years to come.
In partnership with Carats & Cake, Marriott International achieved all campaign objectives.
Curated Content:
• Carats & Cake created a custom Marriott Bonvoy landing page featuring all participating hotels and resorts.
• In the first year of the partnership, nearly 200 dedicated profiles were developed utilizing creative assets sourced by each property. Notably, participating hotels benefitted from custom microsites which include real weddings photography facilitated and curated by Carats & Cake.
• More than 50 Marriott Bonvoy weddings were featured in editorial content throughout the year.
Awareness, Traffic & Engagement:
• The campaign achieved the awareness goal through features on social channels with an average monthly reach of over 26M, garnering 1.17M targeted impressions.
• Editorial content garnered over 130K views, supported by homepage features with 30K+ views that drove 2,500 clicks.
• MI weddings were featured on 160+ posts across Carats & Cake's Instagram in-feed & stories (596K followers); Pinterest (32.4K followers); and TikTok (138.8K followers and 5.2 million likes).
