A case study: Hotel 48LEX

“A new take on luxury”

Focused on sophisticated, authentic Manhattan breaks, Hotel 48LEX offers high-style accommodations and thoughtful guest services with a strong attention to detail. With more than a dozen competitors also on Lexington Avenue and East 48th Street, the hotel faces a challenge to stand out and attract the affluent travelers it strives for.

The strategy

Reaching the right audience

To reach this elevated clientele, the hotel needed to streamline communications and ensure social media content and ads were not only on brand but were targeting the right people. The USP and key brand pillars of modern luxury, detail, sophistication, and simplicity needed to be visible throughout all social media content, advertising, and communications. Voyage Travel Marketing worked to achieve the following objectives:

Objectives

• Grow the property’s Instagram channel, increasing followers and engagements

• Build the hotel brand to reach the desired audience, with social media profiles reflecting the uniqueness of the property

• Generate more direct business, with less of a focus on OTAs

• Promote a higher ADR, with a focus on penthouse, suite and premier room type bookings

• Increase weekend leisure business

To fulfil these objectives, we identified three key areas on which to focus:

STRATEGY

1. Social media content – Develop engaging and compelling social media posts, with a focus on leisure messaging as the primary audience.

2. Guest engagement – Create brand loyalty and raise awareness through community management, ensuring the hotel’s signature service encompasses social media. This includes responding to guest comments, questions and check-ins, alongside proactively engaging with local tourism board pages to extend reach.

3. Targeted social media advertising – Reach our best customers and increase brand visibility by reaching website visitors, past guests, lookalike audiences, and other highly targeted customer segments through paid advertising.

The results

Smashing objectives

The Results

Working closely with the hospitality management team, we were able to refine the target audience, using existing databases to target previous guests and creating lookalike audiences to extend the reach. We also installed a Facebook Pixel on the hotel website, allowing us to re-target website visitors to further drive conversions.

Significant growth can be seen on Instagram between 2018 and 2019, with engagements up 86.6% year to date (January to June 2019), compared with the previous period (July to December 2018). Followers increased 21% in the first six months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018.

There was a shift in ad targeting from overall engagements to conversions and web traffic, which year to date (January to June 2019) has resulted in a 125% increase in revenue compared to the same period. While part of that increase was due to additional ad funds, a 51.5% increase in return on ad spend can be seen. Link clicks increased 104%.

In June 2019, the hotel launched a 7-day flash sale with an incredible offer – pick any room and pay the same price – which was supported with social media advertising. Over 30% of the promotion’s revenue was generated through social media advertising.

Overall, implementing this social media to website traffic and conversions has helped drive revenue for the property, while focusing on pushing the brand’s USP to a more refined audience has resulted in strong engagements both on Instagram and on social media overall.

Marketing that clicks.