Co-Winners: Hawkins International Public Relations - InterContinental New York Barclay Snapchat Takeover with Condé Nast Traveler and Invisalign Drives New Leads While Reducing CPA
Hawkins International Public Relations - InterContinental New York Barclay Snapchat Takeover with Condé Nast Traveler
InterContinental Hotels Group, one of the world's leading hotel companies, recently celebrated the reopening of the newly-renovated, InterContinental New York Barclay, which made its grand debut to New York society in 1926 as one of the original "Railroad" hotels.
For generations the hotel served as one of New York's most preferred addresses and officially reopened its doors at the end of May 2016 following a $180 million, 20-month top-to-bottom renovation.
As Hawkins International Public Relations (HIPR) worked closely with the editorial team at Condé Nast Traveler (CNT) to garner traditional coverage highlighting the hotel’s grand reopening and new features, HIPR’s Digital Team took the opportunity to continue conversations with the publication’s dedicated social community development team to explore social media coverage opportunities and creative a cohesive strategy to drive social media buzz surrounding the reopening.
On the day of the activation, CNT’s social media director was invited to The Barclay to experience the property for herself. A guided site tour was arranged and was led by the hotel’s director of public relations and communications to create a visual journey of The Barclay. The HIPR Digital Team was also present to identify key “Snapchattable” moments, fun facts and the historic relevance of the hotel’s redesign, while also capturing content to cross-promote the process in real-time from the hotel’s social media channels as well as the agency’s accounts.
The photo and video tour provided CNT’s Snapchat followers with an all-access sneak peek into the property including the grand lobby, guest suites, bathrooms, library and specific design details. To tie everything back to World Gin Day and highlight the hotel’s new Gin Parlour, the team worked with their lead mixologist to conclude the hotel tour with a cocktail demonstration of one of their signature libation, The Quintessential G&T.
Not only was The Barclay tour one of the most-viewed stories in the CNT Snapchat account’s history, but the client was so impressed with the audience response and engagement that they decided to officially launch an entire “Hotel Tour” Snapchat content series – making The Barclay the very first featured property.
Invisalign Drives New Leads While Reducing CPA
As the market leader in clear aligners, the Invisalign brand and their agency, Gold Public Relations, were well versed in acquiring new patients.
The brand had built a strong digital presence, but wanted a new way to track and drive leads through Facebook advertising. The main KPIs for the Invisalign brand are to drive primary purchase intent actions on the Invisalign website, but driving from social to a non-mobile optimized lead generation experience proved challenging.
In an effort to prove that the social channel could succeed in driving efficient KPIs by optimizing the entire experience for social and mobile, Gold PR partnered with Mixpo to develop a comprehensive lead generation program. The program would drive and track prospective patients through the entire purchase funnel from awareness and consideration to final purchase, powered entirely by in-stream mobile optimized experiences and Facebook ads.
The "Awareness" campaign launched first, with the goal to create baseline awareness and interest in the product. The campaign consisted of two pieces of creative content highlighting the success of Invisalign treatment from real patients. The first was a link post leading to a custom landing page, where a series of videos encouraged people to get a behind-the-scenes look at what Invisalign treatment is like through personal stories. The second was a link post leading to a separate custom landing page leveraging content the public relations team had generated while working with influential bloggers sharing their Invisalign treatment stories.
The second campaign drove people deeper into the purchasing funnel by engaging Facebook users with a free Smile Assessment. The brand’s original online Smile Assessment captures high quality leads through a quiz where people can find out if Invisalign treatment is right for them. Since the experience was optimized for desktop, they started with a redesign of the Smile Assessment optimized for social.
When compared to the other digital media platforms the Invisalign brand was advertising on, the results from the multi-prong campaign on Facebook were highly successful. The pilot program garnered 21,469 new qualified leads at half the cost of the brand’s previous digital lead generation campaigns, including search.
Honorable Mentions:
- American Foundation for Suicide Prevention - National Suicide Prevention Week
- H+M Communications - Driving Latinos To Universal Pictures’ Compton
- HSS | Hospital for Special Surgery - Gabrielle's Story
- IBM x Marchesa - The Cognitive Dress
- National Association of Insurance Commissioners - Bad Breaks Social Media Campaign with RJ Mitte
- Tier One Partners - Taking Social to the Head of the Class for the ASU GSV Summit
- W2O Group - Nothing can be perfect.