New Year, new developments? - Here's how social can get you talked about

New year, new openings?

If you’ve got any new developments, be that refurbishments, extensions or even entirely new hotels coming up in 2023 – you’ll likely want to shout about them.

And we can help.

Recently, one of our clients, Stanwell House, a boutique hotel in the New Forest reopened following an extensive refurb.

With everything coming together just before Christmas, they decided to go for it – asking us to spring into action and formulate a plan to announce the reopening, which would only be two weeks away.

Given the festive season was upon us, we suggested doing ‘12 Days of Stanwell’ – a unique take on the classic 12 days of Christmas, which would give the hotel’s social followers the opportunity to engage each day, with the opportunity to win an overnight stay at the end.

Across its social channels, Stanwell House’s engagement shot up with a 628% month-on-month increase on Facebook, including 156,640 organic impressions (between 1st and 23rd December), and a 560% increase in engagement on Instagram, with 36,288 organic impressions.

In a novel twist, with the hotel having an iconic frontage (that looked a little like an advent calendar!) each evening, to signify the countdown to the reopening they put the lights on in a front-facing room of the hotel adding a new room over each of the 12 nights until the entire frontage was lit up.

This helped build anticipation, with locals keeping an eye out for the lit-up rooms and discussing it on socials.

Our copy and design teams also worked on creating mailers to shout about it, with the initial mailer announcing that bookings were now open seeing a 70% open rate, including a 27% click through rate.

Our video team also went to the hotel and captured supporting imagery, including creating an overview video of the newly refurbished property.

Furthermore our PR team announced the reopening date to local press, generating news coverage in the key regional titles including the Southern Daily Echo, and the New Milton Advertiser & Lymington Times, while they’ve also secured high profile national press stays for the new year including The Times, The Telegraph and the Independent.

It was a real team effort in pulling everything together so quickly, but it served to create a really exciting period for Stanwell, with lots of interest from near and afar – and the hotel team were delighted with the result.

Think this is something we can help you with? Just get in touch!