Sahara Star taps social media for brand building campaign

Brandlogist conceptualises campaign on Facebook via a dynamic cover photo based on guest experiences culled from the web

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Mumbai | September 19, 2013

Sahara Star, a 5-star hotel in Mumbai, recently reached a benchmark of one lakh fans on Facebook and 1,000 followers on Twitter. It wanted to celebrate the occasion and continuing to drive increased RoI for the brand through current guests/customers. Sahara Star currently has 23,200 check-ins on Facebook, which is one of the highest in the 5-star category, and derives a significant part of its revenue and customer interest from social media.

"The challenge we have been trying to address through social media is not to get a higher fan or follower count. That's easy. To get a relevant fan base and thus drive RoI is frankly pretty tough. One needs to keep optimising with content, media, campaigns, etc," said Saurabh Parmar from Brandlogist, the marketing consultancy managing Sahara Star.

One big challenge which any hospitality brand today faces is that guests are sharing their experiences across the web – Tripadvisor, blogs, forums, Twitter, etc., and a brand would want that all these get aggregated in an interesting way on to the primary platform, which is usually Facebook. For a luxury brand these are strong drivers of consumer interest.

To address this, Brandlogist designed a Facebook cover photo which got updated with a new review from across the web. So, a user may tweet something on Twitter today about the brand, and the people on the Facebook page see his/her experience in their newsfeed via a cover photo.

Feedback from Twitter on Cover Photo

Conversation from Tripadvisor on the dynamic cover photo

Also, a dynamic countdown which seems to be becoming popular these days was included on the cover photo with every new guest experience on the cover (Bisleri and then Lipton also did a dynamic countdown in the last two months).

Apart from that, Sahara Star ran a contest on Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook under the theme of 'Star Moments' where the focus was on guests and building word of mouth through them. On Twitter, the campaign was called #1000Stars where the idea was to crowd-source reasons from Twitter followers for being at the hotel. On Facebook, the campaign, through an app called 'Memorable Moments', asked fans to share their 'Star Moments' with a picture, background and a few words.

"The idea behind all this is to build word of mouth through our guests and relevant fans. It's a strategy which has worked for us. Sahara Star currently has 23,200 checkins on Facebook. Even on Twitter our strategy has never been to follow a lot of people just to get a follow back. Currently our follower-following ratio stands at 12 to 1,096 people," said Parmar.

On the concern of negative reviews coming up on the cover photo app, the brand analyst on the account, Tareeshi Sangal, said, "When you are on social media you are bound to be criticised and it's something we have always dealt by active engagement. Since there was a potential of getting spammed, we also had a CMS (Content Management System) to choose the reviews/tweets which appeared, but the agenda was not to block constructive criticism."

Converting Guest Feedback-From Criticism to a Bravo

"We are excited to reach this major milestone,” said Rajesh Mohan, Marketing Head, Sahara Star. “The hotel has captured more than 25 per cent of its fair market share, thanks to these patrons.”

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

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