November 2015: Today’s target market is different from what it was 10 years ago, not least because of the demographics of the millennial generation and its submersion into the digital world, and the fact that the way consumers choose to engage with brands and consume media has changed considerably. As a result, Protea Hotels has embraced the concept of content marketing in order to continue to attract new customers and retain existing customers whilst keeping the brand relevant. This resulted in the brand engaging with three respected bloggers with significant followings, to create valuable and insightful content for its guests and loyal followers based on these bloggers’ views on the best lifestyle options in their cities, namely Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban.
“We know that more and more of our clients and potential clients are users of social media as their preferred way to engage with brands and to keep up with news and the latest happenings, and that they follow social media influencers, such as bloggers,” explains Nicholas Barenblatt, Group Marketing Manager for Protea Hotels, a proud member of Marriott International. “So we identified three South African bloggers known for their work in the lifestyle and entertainment environments, one each from our major cities. Our Johannesburg blogger is the well-known journalist, Gus Silber, while for the Cape Town blog we’ve partnered with Seth Shezi, a part-time lifestyle and food writer, and for Durban we used the photographer, Lee Folkard.”
The initiative, called Do Summer Your Way, involved calling on each blogger to write about and capture through visuals the best way to spend 48 hours in their city. All of them included visits to favourite restaurants and coffee shops, as well as stopovers at some of the iconic landmarks associated with the city that in many ways capture the essence of their particular urban environments. So you read about the beauty of a hike up Lions Head in Cape Town, a tasty bunny chow in Durban, and a cycle tour through the streets of Soweto – among the many other references to spots that the bloggers choose to frequent.
The blogs are part of Protea Hotels’ content marketing strategy geared around promoting summer holidays, and have been uploaded onto proteahotels.com the company’s website under a section called ‘Summer Holidays’ and distributed via their owned channels such as social media and email marketing to their customer base. To further inspire travelers Protea Hotels engaged a videographer to produce videos showing off the beauty of and some of the best activity options in each location.
“This is really about destination marketing,” says Nicholas. “We’re essentially looking to inspire people to stay local and explore all these key leisure destinations as the location for their summer holiday, but we’re using the opinion of people whose views are authentic and genuine to get the message across. It is the art of communicating with our customers and potential customers without hard selling. By the very nature of this approach, it is non-interruption marketing. We aim to deliver content that inspires, educates and empowers our customers. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as a brand, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to our customers, they ultimately reward us with their travel spend and loyalty.”
To draw people to the blogs, links have been included in emailers to the Protea Hotels loyalty membership base, using guests’ previous travel behaviour as a guideline to determine what content would be most relevant for the recipient of the emailer. In addition, social media postings on sites like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube serve as further drivers to draw people to the Protea Hotels website. An online quiz called Quizmaker allows a visitor to the site to be categorised in terms of the type of holiday he/she is likely to prefer.
“This isn’t a ‘hard sell’ push from Protea Hotels,” Nicholas explains. “We really just want to share the pride that people feel about their cities, and inspire our customers and followers to get out there and experience it for themselves.”
You can join the conversation too – read the blogs and view the videos here