The Luxury Collection is an experiential brand with hotels and destinations rich in transformative journeys and distinctive stories. A stay in a 13th-century monastery, a bookbinding class at a 1907 workshop in Madrid, a private villa surrounded by the dunes and wildlife of Dubai — these are the immersive experiences that make The Luxury Collection exceptional. We crafted a content strategy that ensures our social and digital channels reflect this, inviting travelers to explore what makes our hotels so special and inspire them to create their own one-of-a-kind travel stories with us.
Throughout last year, we refined and expanded upon this content strategy, increasing our storytelling capabilities on our social channels.
Our objectives for this strategy:
Storytelling is at the very center of The Luxury Collection and plays a pivotal role in how we share content on our social and digital channels.
Instead of posting a singular post on Instagram about one hotel or aspirational experience, we grouped our posts according to content themes. 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.
As content styles and audience interests continue to shift on social, we 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. Through utilizing a combination of voice-over and captions as well as lo-fi and professionally-shot content, we shared these stories in a variety of ways that resonated with our audience.
As video content continues to be favored among social media platforms, we optimized our strategy by creating short, single-scene looping videos. These moving portraits (or vignettes) increased the aspirational quality in what would have otherwise been a stagnant image — immersing our audience in a single moment in time and increasing their desire to experience it for themselves.
We utilized Instagram Stories to introduce Tastemakers’ lens on travel with a collection of images & videos from their travels and pull-quotes from their editorial interview. We also used Stories to share select press articles, highlighting featured hotels through a collection of images and pull-quotes from the article. Stories drive to the full editorial piece on theluxurycollection.com or to the referenced press 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.
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.
Over the past two years, we have increased our followers by 52% showing that this type of content is resonating well with luxury travelers. In addition, our total engagement rate is 3.3%, about 7x higher than the industry benchmark. By implementing this strategy, we also saw $7.3M in attributable revenue from bookings made after viewing our content.
Our new Reels franchises continue to grow in popularity among our audience, resulting in some of our highest view rates and most shares on Instagram. In addition, our vignettes prove to be some of our most engaged content, garnering a 7.6% engagement rate.
By implementing an always-on paid amplification strategy, we also accrued 3.7M engagements and 112.2M impressions.
