The Challenge

Social media is of critical importance for the travel industry, so there was a requirement to transform brand perceptions by increasing social media engagement and followers via revolutionising our clients’ content strategy. Creative content required a shake-up, moving away from offer posts and stock imagery towards higher quality, channel-specific content. The client needed user-generated and POV content to put users at the centre of the experience, and encourage greater social interaction from customers while on cruises. 

We had simple but challenging objectives to grow engagement and social following, but the main objective was to measurably transform the positioning of our clients business to create a brand personality which was better suited for social. We had a target of 30 pieces of customer content being shared each week.

An additional challenge we faced was doing so primarily organically. The client had a modest paid budget, and instead wanted to focus on sustainable, organic growth. The ad budget would have to be spent with great efficiency and efficacy.

The solution

Our overall strategy involved reaching new audiences through interactivity across social, better connecting potential customers to the brand. 

Audience profiling was key to this, so we segmented the audience by key regions and then used behavioural understanding to personalise messaging towards these audiences. We identified a potential audience of 26.6m on social, while the current audience size was just 346K, highlighting huge untapped potential.

To reposition our client, we created a dedicated per-channel strategy, profiling the audience on each and identifying the most effective content to use.  

Prior to our work, there was a blanket approach for creating content, and no use of channel specific content such as Instagram Reels. With our production of this content, we would manage to much more effectively communicate key messages. 

As this transformation touched our client’s entire communications strategy, we also reformatted a huge library of creative collateral, so it could be deployed more successfully across a range of channels. 

As part of our initial connection period with our client, we met the team on their cruise, experiencing it directly to fully immerse ourselves in and understand the product. We took this opportunity to capture a huge bank of footage for future use, as well as identifying key points to for reaching and improving the customer journey, pinpointing the following opportunities for customers to engage with the brand on social whilst on board:

• — Stickers at the best points for selfies
• — Key photo spots at journey points for cruisers
• — Signs on the ship to direct cruisers to social – for example, stickers on mirrors saying ‘take a selfie, use this hashtag’
• — We also managed Instagram influencer content and collaborations 

On top of this, we maximised interactions from potential customers in a number of ways, such as boosting strong content to reach new audiences, then inviting those who interacted with boosted posts to follow the corresponding social profiles. We also drove engagement with multiple forms of interactive content. 

Overall, this changed our client’s whole marketing approach by integrating the brand with modern social platforms and creating authentic, user-orientated content.

What the client has to say about working with Bonded

“At the start of our engagement with the Bonded team we engaged in a process of auditing the existing activity and developing a social media strategy that identified areas of opportunity for our business to focus on, in order to deliver significant improvements in audience engagement and reach through 2022 and beyond.

These areas of opportunity included Bonded identifying specific areas of innovation to increase investment in, aligned with our overall brand and content strategy. These specific areas included increased deployment of short form video across Instagram Reels, upweighting of destination & experience focussed creative through placements such as Instagram Stories and increased focus on social sharing and engagement with our customer content too.

The introduction of these strategic channel initiatives has led to a significant increase in traffic, views and audience engagement from our social media activity. Throughout all their work, Bonded have developed & amplified our ‘core brand strategy’ effectively within social media, which has helped us to achieve an important marketing objective.

I’d highly recommend working with Bonded. Their strategy, planning and activation work, and overall consultative approach has been very impressive and highly effective for improving our business performance. We’ve really enjoyed working with the Bonded team. We find them responsive, knowledgeable and effective in their delivery. A valued agency partner that we trust and look forward to working with increasingly more in the future.”

If you’re looking to take your brand’s social media presence to the next level…

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