eight&four x sandals resorts: Caribbean blues campaign
We worked with Sandals Resorts to produce a content-rich, multi-channel campaign with dual aims of driving bookings and celebrating the rich culture, heritage, and unique identities of Sandals’ Caribbean destinations. We aligned our campaign with Caribbean Heritage Month to compound awareness.
THE CHALLENGE
Our challenge with the Caribbean Blues campaign was not only to promote and celebrate cultural diversity within the Caribbean, but also to position Sandals Resorts as the stand-out Caribbean vacation spot in a crowded, competitive, luxury vacation market.
To cut through the noise, we needed to experiment with innovative channels and formats to drive user engagement and create excitement around Sandals and Beaches Resorts, in turn generating conversions. In a marketplace where consumers are saturated with social content, we needed to innovate to develop a tactical, engaging campaign proposal with a distinct look and feel.
Our challenge also came in the form of effectively conveying Sandals’ unique connection and deep-rooted links with the Caribbean, building awareness of cultural tradition whilst demonstrating an expert knowledge of each destination.
THE INSIGHT
Consumer research conducted through brand consultancy Studio Aapt has shown that travellers are becoming more and more invested in local culture and tend to seek authentic experiences from travel brands to enhance their cultural understanding of their chosen destination.
From our own experience of running the Sandals social media channels, we consistently see that content which celebrates the unique blues of the Caribbean always performs the strongest.
This campaign aimed to unite these two key insights-simultaneously affirming our Caribbean-born identity and therefore authority within the Caribbean travel space, as well as promoting our destinations and encouraging new bookings
THE SOLUTION
Our strategic approach employed a variety of social-first formats combined with strong CTAs and messaging to drive awareness and bookings. This formed a dual-phase approach across organic and dark channels.
Our campaign content on Twitter and Facebook utilised striking visuals alongside immersive copy featuring the hashtag #RhythmandBlues to engage prospects, while encouraging sensory nostalgia and a desire to return amongst existing customers.
On Instagram, we implemented a month-long feed takeover, with a campaign-specific visual direction inspired by the extraordinary hues of blue that are bespoke to each Caribbean island. Each feed asset was individually designed using colour swatches to land the campaign visually.
We delivered engagement-focused creative to users on TikTok and Twitter by encouraging them to complete a poll, intended to amplify the audience’s voice and bridge the gap between brand and consumer–something that’s especially important to Sandals as a customer-centric, family-owned business.
On YouTube, we created 5 different bumper ads to further improve brand visibility and awareness.
We also experimented with the Meta Advantage Plus Catalogue Ad to pique the interest of potential customers with targeted content.
Our Beaches channels emphasised lower-funnel activities, using thumb-stopping content, alluring copy and a clear ‘Book Now’ CTA to generate conversions.
THE IMPACT
In terms of upper funnel activity, we completely transcended our expectations, and throughout the course of the campaign we reached a larger audience than expected by nearly 60%.
We surpassed the number of estimated impressions by just under 12M, we improved on our estimated engagements by 40,000, and we generated over 2.7M views (just over 2.3M more than expected)–indicating that the awareness and engagement components of the campaign were more than effective.
It is worth noting that TikTok generated over a third of the total impressions (over 5M) and during this campaign, it very much stood out as both an innovative and viable advertising option.
While the traffic also exceeded our estimates, we fell short of our target number of bookings. Having analysed these results, in future, we need to make the alignment between the ad and the landing page clearer with CTA clarity.
This campaign has proven very strong for Beaches, resulting in nearly 100 bookings–a 73% increase on our estimations. Overall, we are delighted with the results of this campaign as well as the insights we have gained to help innovate for future challenges.