Client
The Marmara is part of an international hotel group with two locations in New York City: The Marmara Manhattan and their flagship location, The Marmara Park Avenue. The brand is known for pairing impeccable style with unparalleled comfort.
Overview
Luxury Built to Stay
Combining a modern and luxurious lifestyle with comfort and convenience, The Marmara sought to break into the over-saturated luxury hotel market of New York City. The Marmara needed to establish their luxury brand in New York City. They also needed to build credibility as a international hospitality business here to stay.
Challenge
New to Market
The Marmara was a well known brand in Turkey and to those who travel to Turkey, but were virtually unknown in other markets. Our challenge was to take an unknown brand and make them internationally recognizable. In order to gain credibility and trust within an international market, we needed to position the brand as a solid luxury hotel in the highly competitive New York City.
Solution
Consistency is Key
We began our journey by focusing the organization’s branding. We reimagined The Marmara’s business branding in order to differentiate it from its Turkish roots, and to represent their luxury status. We created The Marmara New York to centralize our marketing efforts, and use the New York with our business name. This way, we could cross promote both properties under one account and anticipate the growth of the brand for any new locations in the pipeline.
Wanting to create a name for The Marmara as a New York institution, we launched a campaign on social media and their blog to strengthen this New York City characteristic of their brand. On both forums, we spotlighted New York’s famous landmarks and noted their proximity to the The Marmara locations. By publishing articles about New York City via The Marmara’s website, we optimized their chances of showing up in search engine results.
On the social media side, we utilized highly-populated New York City hashtags within the world of hotels, fashion and travel in order to reach audiences interested in these topics and introduce them to their brand. We also geotagged New York City landmarks on The Marmara’s feed so as to associate the hotel with the city.
Spreading Like Wildfire
With solidified branding and an identity on social media, we set the stage for The Marmara to partner with a number of prominent social media influencers. Our strategy and brand guidelines helped their PR team to comb the city to find powerful influencers in the realms of lifestyle, fashion and travel. This niche was chosen because their followers most resembled an audience that we wanted to target: fashionable, young people.
We also created partnerships with luxury brands to be able to utilize their influencers to connect with the world of luxury. Each group of influencers generated stunning photographs, which we were able to use on all platforms beyond just social media. Most importantly, they introduced our brand to their millions of followers.
To emphasize the buzz and growing popularity of the brand, we shared influencer posts, blog posts and original cinemagraphs on The Marmara’s social channels. This helped continually spread the message that The Marmara Park Avenue is an exceptional experience.
Building a Strong Foundation
As well as harnessing attention to our brand, we focused on facilitating online business. We redesigned the hotel website so that the most important calls to action, such as “book a room”, were placed at the forefront and repeated throughout. This way, potential patrons could quickly and easily make reservations. Additionally, we kept any images lightweight, so that webpages would be fast and responsive on all devices, including mobile.