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THE LUDLOW HOTEL

The Ludlow is one of New York City’s premiere boutique hotels, with an aesthetic that evokes the artful rough edges and effortless appeal of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The 175-room property approached Media Whisper with a challenge – to establish their social media presence in a way that reflected the guest experience and authentically represented the property’s connection to its unique neighborhood, while driving more direct bookings via the hotel’s home page. With a brand-first approach and a minimal advertising budget, Media Whisper successfully channeled the uniqueness of the brand into revenue-generating social media communities on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Client Goals

  • Establish a high-quality social media presence for the hotel, with a brand-first approach which closely follows and accurately represents the guest experience, the property’s style, and the brand’s connection to its neighborhood.
  • Build awareness around the hotel’s newly created social media channels and grow the audience from the ground up.
  • Drive direct bookings via the hotel’s home page, shifting bookings away from online travel agencies.
  • Highlight the guest experience using a mix of owned and user-generated visual content.
  • Avoid a cookie-cutter approach to the hotel’s content and voice, focusing on the core customer demographics and the lifestyles they represent.

Our Strategy

Our first step was to fully immerse ourselves in the hotel brand – its history, the neighborhood, the guest experience from check-in to check-out, reviews from past guests, existing marketing materials, the staff’s training manual – anything and everything available to us. We also focused on the hotel’s core customer demographics, to understand what motivates people to choose this neighborhood among all of the options in Manhattan.

The property is rooted in the history of the Lower East Side: creative, disruptive, effortlessly cool, rough around the edges, and utterly unique. The hotel brand reflects these traits in every way, challenging the status quo with an experience designed to leave an impression.

The people who frequent the Lower East Side tend to be creative, social, often fashionforward, and keen to discover experiences that set them apart from the norm. We aimed to highlight the artful grittiness of the property in a way that spoke directly to these qualities.

Outside of architectural photography, the hotel had no visual content available. An integral element of our strategy was to establish a bank of social media-friendly images, capturing images of each element of the guest experience, including the surrounding neighborhood.

Social Presence

A breakdown of how each social media channel was used to benefit the brand.

We utilized Facebook’s robust Ads Manager platform to target appropriate audiences and potential hotel guests with content from the hotel.

We inserted a Facebook Pixel on the hotel’s website, which was used to retarget ads to website visitors, especially those who had visited the site but not yet booked a room.

We posted a mix of content, rotating between photos, videos, user-generated content, press features, reviews/blogs mentioning the hotel, and neighborhood-specific content relevant to the audience and catered to their interests when visiting NYC.

We built a Messenger Chat Bot to interact with users who engaged with the Facebook Page and answer commonly asked questions about the hotel, guiding them through a series of prompts which displayed the different room types and encouraged booking.

We maximized the visual element of Instagram and focused on making it the strongest channel for the hotel. The account was launched by creating a large mosaic “grid,” using multiple high-res images of the property, giving users a reason to spend more time on the account upon discovery. Visual content was grouped in “themes,” showcasing all elements of the property – rooms, F&B, common areas, views, amenities – and the surrounding neighborhood. Paid social content was targeted to Instagram users via Facebook Ads Manager, focusing on objectives that drove user engagements and revenue-generating website traffic.
Twitter was the lowest priority social media platform for hotel leadership. We launched the channel as an organic experiment, using no advertising budget, to ensure that travelers and fans using this platform were able to connect with the hotel. We used Twitter to share a slightly wider variety of content than on Facebook and Instagram, incorporating articles and relevant news from local press outlets. We targeted users who engaged with hashtags relevant to the property, including #LowerEastSide, #NYFW, and similar. This resulted in organically growing the following to several thousand users.

Our Results

YEAR ONE

FACEBOOK

IMPRESSIONS

Average Daily Impressions: 5.9K
Average Daily Reach: 3.8K
Organic Impressions: 838.3K

ENGAGEMENTS

Total Engagements: 106,837
Engagement Rate (per impression): 4.9%

INSTAGRAM

IMPRESSIONS

Average Daily Impressions: 53.7K
Average Daily Reach: 1.9K

ENGAGEMENTS

Total Engagements: 72,557
Engagement Rate (per impression): 5.4%

TWITTER

IMPRESSIONS

Average Daily Impressions: 1.1K
Engagement Rate (per impression): 2.1%

ENGAGEMENTS

Total Engagements: 7,664
Engagement Rate (per impression): 3.3%

Audience Growth

YEAR ONE

The hotel’s Instagram account took off quickly, with the focus on high-res, stylized photography helping to achieve viral reach and rapid growth. Facebook and Twitter grew at a slower pace, though both with very high engagement rates for their respective audience size.

FACEBOOK

Total Followers after Year One: 4,014

INSTAGRAM

Total Followers after Year One: 19,464

TWITTER

Total Followers after Year One: 2,378

Paid Social Results

Facebook & Instagram Ads

AMOUNT SPENT

$x,xxx

POST ENGAGEMENT

Total Paid Post Engagement: 54,186
Cost per Post Engagement: $0.08

LINK CLICKS

Total Link Clicks: 3,765
Cost per Link Click: $0.69

IMPRESSIONS

Total Paid Impressions: 602,377
Cost per Impression: $0.07

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