Social Media
CPG Hotels
Overview
CPG Hotels are one of New Zealand’s largest independent hotel chains with hotels in five cities throughout New Zealand including Auckland, Rotorua, Wellington, Picton and Dunedin. CPG Hotels came to Digital Hothouse for full-service digital marketing management including SEO, Google Adwords and social media management having never done any work in the online space before. You can read more about our SEO and Adwords work with CPG on the relevant pages, however our focus here was to raise awareness of the CPG brand throughout New Zealand through social media platforms.
Social Media
SEO
Copywriting
Website Design and Development
Building a fan base
Whilst people throughout New Zealand may be familiar with the individual hotels that are owned and operated by CPG Hotels, there was very little awareness of the CPG brand. An important element of our work on social media platforms was to build that brand awareness so that customers would associate each of the individual hotels with the larger chain. When we took over the management of their social media, only one of the hotels had a current Facebook page and there was no main corporate account.
The challenge
CPG Hotels wanted to be everywhere all at once: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WeBo, WeChat, LinkedIn…we knew this simply wasn’t feasible to launch the brand successfully across all these platforms starting from scratch so we decided to focus first on Facebook, a platform we felt would be best suited to their audience both in New Zealand and overseas. The first challenge was deciding how to manage the individual hotels – each destination wanted their own identity and we agreed that this was important. We also needed to create a main corporate account where we could help to promote the individual hotels and keep people up to date with stories and news from all seven hotels.
Content strategy
After deciding to set up individual Facebook pages for all hotels and use Facebook’s ‘Location’ feature to link them all to the main account, the next task was deciding how to manage each page and how we were going to generate the volume of content needed to keep the audience engaged, no matter which hotel they were following. Working closely with the CPG management team and liaising with the individual hotels, we created a content strategy for each hotel which was in part managed by us with content also generated from inside each hotel, from staff and from customers.
The launch
We knew that we needed to make a big impact in order to really raise the awareness of CPG around New Zealand and beyond. Again, working closely with the management team at CPG, we created a prize package that included flights, accommodation, meals and activities in each of the five cities where CPG are based and gave people the opportunity to win a weekend away for two people in one of those cities. This allowed us to create some awesome posts and adverts to promote the campaign and also created links with over 14 activity providers throughout New Zealand who would help promote the competition.
The Results
The competition launched on the last day of June and at this point, only the Four Canoes Facebook page had any followers (around 400) so we had our work cut out to try and promote each of the pages and generate the volume of followers that would ensure we could engage with them beyond the launch of the Facebook pages. The results we achieved over the four week period that the competition ran were staggering:
10,864
Total page likes
As well as adding over 10,000 new fans across their eight Facebook pages, we also achieved extremely high engagement and reach over 1 million people throughout New Zealand and worldwide.
- 7.7% average engagement
- 248,838 organic reach
- 1,040,037 total reach
- 25,944 engaged users
- 198 total posts
3,670
Competition entries
Whilst we wanted to focus on growing the pages, we also wanted to ensure users were engaging with the other content we were posting on the page. To achieve an average engagement of 7.7% across all eight pages was a great result and something we now hope to build on.
"Digital Hothouse have been perfect to work with. They’re attentive, quick to respond, come up with great ideas and are really proactive. In addition, they’ve brought thousands of new bookings to our properties."
