Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
During the pandemic, when travel content in consumer and business media outlets was drastically reduced or removed altogether, it was imperative for Preferred Hotels & Resorts to consider and implement new outreach tactics that would continue to build relevance and credibility for the brand with their readers and disrupted travel audiences. This piece was published just before Christmas, which appropriately felt like a gift and confirmed the success of our earlier pivot to focus on thought leadership and commentary inclusions for our senior team in deep dive reports and topical features.
Our 2021 goal to strongly position Preferred Hotels & Resorts as an authority in the independent hotel space required pro-action and staying on top of trending topics and breaking travel news. Before securing this significant inclusion on wellness travel for our CCO in The New York Times - Travel online, our PR team crafted an outreach strategy that leaned into the expertise of several Preferred leaders, including marketing, revenue optimization, development, and sales, targeting travel reporters and freelancers writing for key consumer and trade titles. As a result, our PR team achieved multiple thought-leadership focused dedicated articles and inclusions in wider industry-facing features in the United States and globally.
Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
In the months before achieving a thought leadership wellness travel inclusion in the NYT piece 'Travel as Healing', the PR team became adept at securing regular consumer media inclusions in titles like Business Insider and Forbes, and dedicated opinion pieces in trade outlets such as HOTELS and TravelAge West for our brand experts. These wins helped build confidence and refined our technique for the proactive pitching of themes that Preferred could speak to, ultimately helping us to secure this feature after two previous attempts with the writer Concepcion de Leon.
The PR team spent time collating and crafting talking points on trending topics with leaders from across the business, covering wellness travel, sustainability in hospitality, future travel, and technology in the hospitality sector, among other hot buttons. The team also consistently monitored breaking news stories to ensure that responses could be proactively and reactively pitched within 24 hours. To help secure this piece, the PR team shared ideas on email with de Leon before arranging a meeting in September 2021 to discuss what our sales revenue and marketing communications experts were seeing in the US and globally and how our hotels were navigating and responding to the headwinds and tailwinds. This meeting created an opportunity to contribute to a wider feature she was starting to develop on the evolution of wellness travel as a result of COVID from a hotel representation brand perspective.
The PR team followed up within one day with commentary and supporting data from our CCO, which was included in the published article alongside Hilton and Miraval Resorts and Spa - both of which have first-hand experience with wellness in hotels because they own and operate their properties, unlike Preferred Hotels & Resorts which operates a membership model offering sales, marketing and distribution services.
Budget: Please include total budget vs. total actual cost. How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
This earned media piece had no hard costs attached as the PR team are employees of Preferred Hotels & Resorts. The equivalent advertising value for the placement is approximately US$216,324 (utilizing an industry standard 15 CPM and The New York Times’ 43,264,806 unique monthly visitors for impressions), saving, or enhancing, our marketing budget for the same dollar amount in advertising spend.
Entry Title
New York Times - Travel as Healing
Division
Public Relations/Communications - FEATURE PLACEMENT ONLINE - Consumer Media
Category
Public Relations/Communications