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How we capitalised on a trending conversation to drive high volume bookings for Sandals & Beaches Resorts.
As the retained social agency for Sandals & Beaches Resorts, our main focus is on seeking new audiences for the brand and ultimately driving those all-important room bookings. With Travel Tuesday having a resurgence in popularity, this presented us with an opportunity to reach new, younger audiences and fill rooms all at the same time… but how could we ensure we showed up in the right spaces with the right content at the right time, in order to cut through the competitor noise before the conversation stopped trending?
Search interest around Travel Tuesday increased fivefold from 2021 – 2023, with rising travel costs causing travellers to prioritise seeking out good deals. Of this search interest, resort destinations came out a firm favourite in 2023, with traffic for key destinations (including Nassau, Bahamas, one of our own Sandals locations) spiking higher by around 37% compared to surrounding Tuesdays.
The fact that Travel Tuesday also occurs during a period where there’s typically a lull in travel bookings (as it’s too late for winter bookings and too early for summer ones) but an increase in gift purchasing, means it provides a new hook with which to engage prospective travellers and capitalise on the year-end spending. This presented the perfect opportunity for us to drive new and existing consumers to consider ‘giving the gift of the Caribbean’, whether to themselves or a loved one, for a more affordable cost.
With just one day to play with, we knew our content had to be thumb-stopping and strategically informed in order to deliver our desired impact.
Identifying Instagram and TikTok as the right social spaces for our activity (due to their younger audience demographics and volumes of Travel Tuesday conversation), we created a channel-first content plan to help achieve our objectives:
TIKTOK: Seeing an opportunity to trial a new format on TikTok, we reached out to our partners and were granted access to use their new Gesture Ad placement. We created 2x bespoke videos – playing on ASMR-style escapism for Sandals Resorts and a dynamic child-centric clip for our family-focused Beaches Resorts audience – with creative CTA overlays to grab attention and drive users to site in a natural, immersive way.
INSTAGRAM: We launched a mini feed takeover for Sandals Resorts, bringing this to life through a row of 3x designed assets with illustrated elements and textural borders evoking a travel feel. Of these 3x assets, one took the form of a hero film, inspired by a trending CapCut transition taking users from activating aeroplane mode on their phone, to seeing on a real aeroplane landing in their holiday destination. Playing on this allowed us to reinforce our sales message in a visceral way, demonstrating how with just a few clicks, consumers could also find themselves transported from a social ad to the Caribbean. For our Beaches Resorts hero film, we leveraged a different trending transition aimed at directly engaging our family audience – taking users inside a polaroid frame to reveal a montage of memories they could make for themselves, with their own loved ones, against the backdrop of the Caribbean.
Harnessing a new ad format on TikTok allowed us to assert Sandals as a creative innovator on this channel.
Our TikTok Gesture Ads outperformed our awareness and traffic-related benchmarks, driving 1.9M video views, as well as 65.9K clicks to site.
Despite the campaign being geared towards sales objectives, it also drove strong levels of user engagement, with 4.5K interactive add on engagements and 4.7K likes, comments and shares across channels.
