Starwood on being mobile first, its social success and an Instagram flop

The group’s director of digital will be sharing his mobile insights in Miami this week. Here is a taster

Glenn Stress, Starwood Director of Digital-Americas Starwood Hotels & Resorts is confident that its great strides in mobile will align very nicely with Marriott’s objectives “as we collectively innovate in this space and transform the guest experience”.

Stress will be sharing more about Starwood’s mobile strategy in Miami this week but to wet your appetite here is a recent recap of mobile moves over the past year.

Just to recap on the group’s recent mobile moves:

  1. Personal touch: Starwood is a mobile first, digitally led company. A few months ago the group relaunched its SPG app, which is now more personalised than ever. Soon on-property offers and promotions will be available via the app.

  2. First is key: SPG Keyless was a first in the mobile space, and allows the guest to completely bypass the front desk and check in using their mobile phone as a room key.

  3. Apple of the eye: Apple chose Starwood as its only hotel partner to be included in the Apple Watch launch a year ago. Now guests can open their doors with their Apple Watch or mobile phone.

  4. Emoji moves: New initiatives have come from Aloft Hotels, one of the chains under Starwood umbrella, which recently launched the world’s first emoji-only room service menu. Guests, believe it or not, can order in-room essentials by texting the corresponding emoji to the front desk!

  5. Let’s chat: An increasing number of hotels in Europe, Africa and the Middle East are also using Starwood’s own ‘Let’s Chat’ messaging platform that allows guests to communicate with the hotel pre-stay, in-stay and post-stay through either BBM, iMessage or WhatsApp messaging apps.

Stress on social success….

Some of Starwood’s most successful campaigns have been in the social space – primarily because of the sophisticated targeting that is possible when you align campaign objectives with a target audience’s social graphs.

“It’s really important to think of social as an ecosystem where you can adapt the messaging to tell a story over time. This is much more effective than focusing on an immediate action,” says Stress.

It’s really important to think of social as an ecosystem where you can adapt the messaging to tell a story over time…. much more effective than focusing on an immediate action

For example, Starwood recently ran an awareness campaign on Facebook, being one of the first travel companies to utilise one of their newest advertising platforms; the chain was an early adopter of Facebook Dynamic Ads Product, which launched for travel last week. At the same time, it also ran a compelling video focusing on resorts and then continued the conversation via a follow up message to people who engaged with the video.

“The sequencing of the content allowed us to tell a much deeper story and really convey a stronger message to the consumer,” says Stress.

Stress is unable to share ROI figures but says: “We see Facebook as an ecosystem where we can continue to have conversations with guests from awareness to direct response. The campaigns that we have run through Facebook have proven to be very successful in multiple use cases across brands.”

…and an Instagram flop

One campaign that didn’t work as well as we had hoped was a pilot on Instagram for one of our newest brands. The campaign received less engagement than other brands, and it was interesting to compare the campaign against others.

From this there were three lessons:

  • Social-specific creative must be developed in good time for the launch.

  • Compelling imagery and crea[tive is key to successful engagement

  • Simply repurposing other content isn’t nearly as effective

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