How We Reached 17.6 Million People for an Eco-Hotel
THE BRIEF
The Green House Hotel tasked the SBPR team with raising awareness and building up the profile of the eco-conscious hotel both to holidaymakers and couples seeking their dream wedding destination.
THE CHALLENGE
Bournemouth is a popular choice for tourists which means there are hundreds of hotels in the town; lots of competition for The Green House Hotel. Our challenge was to show tourists looking for a hotel break, and couples looking for a wedding venue, why The Green House Hotel was the best option.
THE SOLUTION
The SBPR team worked on a multi-faceted PR strategy designed to achieve maximum coverage for the hotel, drawing on all of the unique experiences and initiatives the hotel offers. Below are a just a few of the strategies the SBPR team put into practice:
Wedding Press
With the bridal press being notoriously hard to place articles in without advertising spend, the team came up with creative concepts which would be guaranteed to raise the interest of journalists. One of the team’s creative concepts was the launch of the UK’s first ever Vegan Wedding Package, allowing brides and grooms to design their wedding around sustainable principles. The package was inspired by the nation’s growing vegan population which now includes more than 3.5 million people and the increasing space dedicated to a vegan lifestyle in newspapers, magazines and online. To create the package, the team reached out to vegan suppliers, from Fairtrade dress designers to cruelty-free make-up artists and created an extensive list of suppliers the hotel’s wedding planners could use to ensure the day was beautiful as well as kind to the environment. By creating a first-of-its-kind package, SBPR created something new for journalists to write about in the bridal and national media resulting in coverage in publications including Hello!, MSN, Bride, Your Wedding Magazine, Wedding Ideas, The Kind Bride, Vegan Living, Veg News and The Independent to name a few. For this campaign alone, the team achieved 19 pieces of coverage reaching two million people!
Another of the team’s creative campaigns designed to boost wedding bookings for the hotel was the Low Carbon Honeymoon feature. This was a follow-up to a previous campaign the team had successfully run on Low Carbon Weddings, positioning The Green House Hotel as the perfect wedding venue for those couples keen to have a low carbon wedding. SBPR worked with Bournemouth-based carbon counting company Count On Me to calculate the carbon cost of honeymoons in Thailand, America, and at The Green House Hotel. Honeymoons in Thailand and America worked out in excess of 15 tonnes of carbon per couple compared to just 0.5 tonnes for a honeymoon at The Green House Hotel. We pitched these facts and figures to key journalists along with a case study of a couple who had honeymooned at the hotel to secure coverage. The Carbon Honeymoon campaign was featured six times across the wedding publications including double page spreads in Your Wedding Magazine, Green Union and To Have & To Hold. By securing articles in the sought-after wedding press we succeeded in increasing the wedding bookings for the hotel, with couples from across the UK choosing The Green House Hotel for their special day.
Press Trips
Alongside creative campaigns, the SBPR team also organises press trips to showcase the hotel’s USPs as a sustainable holiday destination, allowing journalists to experience everything the Green House Hotel has to offer first-hand. The team invited journalists from respected titles including The Daily Telegraph, Metro.co.uk, Red magazine, Women’s Health, My Weekly, The Ecologist, Fabulous and The Wharf magazine to stay and also dine at the hotel. Each of the journalists explored the sights of the local area and dined at the award-winning fully sustainable hotel restaurant, the Arbor, during their stay to get the full hotel experience, resulting in long-form reviews and features read by millions. Travel Round Ups The SBPR team are always pitching The Green House Hotel for inclusion in travel ‘round up’ features. By ensuring the whole team knows all there is to know about The Green House Hotel’s exemplary green attributes, they can share a genuine passion for the hotel’s ethos with journalists, securing the features it deserves in top publications. The teams carefully crafted pitched and superb media relations have secured features in titles such as The Telegraph, The Independent, The Metro, National Geographic, GQ, and Red.
Local News
It was important to the hotel that residents of Dorset and surrounding counties were continuously reminded of everything the hotel had to offer. By always keeping an open line of communication with the hotel, the SBPR team were able to ensure that local news outlets were kept up to date with the community serving initiatives run by The Green House Hotel, and that the award-winning Arbor Restaurant’s profile grew as a destination for fine eco-conscious dining. Thanks to the team’s regional media relations, hundreds of features were achieved for The Green House Hotel in regional titles, reaching thousands of local residents.
THE OUTCOME
By working closely with the Green House Hotel team, the SBPR team not only raised awareness of the hotel but grew its reputation as a stand-out destination with national journalists and their readers. With eco-conscious travel and staycations a sector experiencing exponential growth, the SBPR team kept their finger on the pulse of public opinion, making sure The Green House Hotel was featured in every suitable opportunity.
SBPR’s adaptable and creative PR campaigns, as well as their ability to capitalise on reactive media opportunities resulted in securing a mammoth 227 pieces of coverage for The Green House Hotel, reaching 17.6 million people, and if that space had been bought in advertising, it would have cost over £1.7million!