A partnership between leading hotel group Choice Hotels Asia Pacific and Digital Stack is delivering significant follower growth for franchisees, supporting a boom in website traffic and direct online hotel bookings.
Since introducing digital marketing services for franchisees using the Digital Stack platform the group has seen follower increases of over 60 percent across Facebook and Instagram, which has supported organic website traffic growth of 206 percent and direct online bookings up 106 percent in the last 6 months.
Choice Hotels Asia Pacific Senior Direct Senior Director, Strategy, Sales & Marketing Kari Hunter presented a case study at the recent No Vacancy Hotel & Accommodation Industry Expo in Sydney, demonstrating how the platform has supported the network to grow its collective digital presence and drive direct online reservations.
“The Digital Stack platform gives our hotel owners the ability to localise brand campaigns and digital assets to accommodate their individual hotel images, regional, and adjust messaging to their target audience,” she says.
“It also provides franchisees with the opportunity to opt into supported campaign posts facilitated by Choice Hotels Asia Pacific. Allowing campaign messaging to be published directly to individual hotels’ social media pages takes away double handling of group-wide initiatives and ensures every hotel benefits from campaign activations.”
Ms Hunter says having consistent messaging across the network’s social media accounts reinforces Choice Hotels’ brands and removes much of the stress for hoteliers in ensuring their social media presence is up to date.
“Managing consistent, on brand digital marketing can be a time consuming and expensive exercise for small businesses. We are excited to be able to support our franchisees with this service and turn social media marketing from an intimidating exercise into something that is effortless,” Ms Hunter says.
Leveraging the group’s portfolio of social media accounts into a single platform has allowed Choice Hotels Asia Pac to drive a groundswell of organic social reach to compliment and amplify the groups digital advertising efforts.
“All our campaigns are now amplified across individual hotels social media pages. As a group, and at an individual hotel level, we can execute campaigns efficiently and cost effectively, and ensure each of the five brands in market – Ascend Hotel Collection, Clarion, Quality, Comfort and Econo Lodge – are always represented at their best,” she says.
Franchisees can leverage the group promotion and content calendar and add in their properties individual/bespoke campaigns and local area marketing messages. They have access to a wide range of branded templates, and they can schedule posts in advance, access and monitor reporting metrics on their social media pages and campaigns, and request specific one-off designs as needed.
“Digital marketing is an incredibly fast-moving beast, and we’ve found that Digital Stack helps us to ensure that even our smallest hotels can easily manage their online presence. The platform allows our franchisees to connect with guests and potential guests through professional branded digital local area marketing content,” says Ms Hunter.
