AUSTRALIAN HOTELIER FEATURE: CATHERINE ON SNIPER SOCIAL MEDIA
Australian Hotelier interviewed Catherine on the hyper targeted social media strategies that saw the Rose of Australia take out the Australian Hotelier Award for best social media activity. Read the full below or check it out on The Shout
Sniper tactics: Targeted social media strategies
15 December, 2017 by Vanessa Cavasinni
On the back of executing the winning campaign for ‘Best Social Media Activity’ at this year’s AHA Awards, Catherine Slogrove of Papaya shares how a hyper-local approach can convert your social media efforts.
Big numbers can be impressive but it’s not about the number of likes or followers, it’s about driving real business conversion and engaging the right target market. Through a local social media campaign, The Rose of Australia secured 140 function enquiries 10 days following the launch of its function space, Howard’s, on social media.
Slogrove suggests a targeted social media strategy is more effective than a just posting content into the social media ether. Here are her key tactics:
1. Put your money where your audience is
Sitting in my office in Neutral Bay, sometimes I see promotions for venues in Miranda. There are 17 million Australians on Facebook and five million on Instagram. There’s no way you can, or would want to reach them all.
Instead, focus on hyper-geo-targeting. That is making every dollar count by promoting content to geographically very small areas around your venue to reach your exact local target audience. We also use geo-hash tagging with suburbs surrounding the venue to ensure our content is popping up under the right hash tags.
And sometimes it’s not even small numbers, Gregory Hills Hotel saw a following of nearly 10,000 in just three months using a hyper local approach. Come launch, the venue saw 9,000 covers in 10 days.
2. Put in the time to engage with locals
We dedicate a block of time every day to engage with the local community via Instagram for our clients. That involves searching popular locations and hash tags and proactivity reaching out to the local community in a very personal way.
Would buying a heap of followers from the Philippines be quicker and easier? Forget it, it’s counterproductive. Rather spend your time on growing a valuable audience, that is, people who you want in your venue on a regular basis.
3. Showcase your personality
Online, a pub should behave like your best friend; there to pick you up, keep it real and offer a schooner of beer at the end of a hard day. Every best friend is different, just like every pub is different, so focus on showcasing a personality that you think will resonate with your patrons and keep it consistent.
In the case of The Rose of Australia, Erskineville is super sassy, edgy and a little kinky so we’ve tried to permeate that sass through post copy, imagery and even the way that we respond to comments.