FIVE GOLD-STANDARD MARKETING IDEAS FOR 2022

How to make sure the New Year gets off to a flying start at your spa

Tracey Stapleton

This issue in our Gold List of Spas we’re celebrating the best of the best when it comes to new developments. Just like gold medal-winning Olympians, the best spas owe their high levels of success to three things.

First is the pursuit of excellence: spas doing the absolute best they can and always striving for improvement through new innovations and developments. The best athletes and the ones who tend to win medals are those who continue to build on their strengths, making small changes to move forward.

The second trait can be summed up as ‘friendship’: developing an understanding and fine-tuning communications with people, whether they be employees, suppliers or customers. And thirdly comes respect: consideration for others and the wider environment and taking genuine action to prove this.

A gold-standard marketing campaign takes into consideration these core traits, leveraging insights and the latest technology to deliver continued business success. Here we look at five ways this could be achieved in 2022.

1. Align your brand with your audience’s values

In 2022, while price and quality still remain top-of-mind considerations, a research paper by Deloitte reveals that high-growth brands are putting an emphasis on employees and society as 42% of consumers are more loyal to brands that commit to addressing social inequities. This means it is more important to align your brand with what’s important to your customers.

Consumers, particularly Gen Z, now expect brands to take genuine stances on certain social issues, whether that is sustainability, advocacy or diversity, equality and inclusion. Review your audience data and see how their shopping habits or engagement has changed over the past few months so you can regularly adapt your marketing strategy to meet their needs.

2. Prioritise your own channels and data

Social media audiences are extremely valuable but when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for several hours earlier this year, we were reminded just how fragile they can be. We don’t own our audiences on these channels and are dependent on algorithms that can, at important times, make us invisible to them.

Tracey Stapleton, founder, The Spa PR Company

Therefore it’s important to continually build and nurture your own data and channels, where you will have more control and higher customer loyalty. Incorporating spa software that is fully cloud-based and connects all your main APIs (application programming interfaces) will enable you to do this automatically and seamlessly.

3. Produce people-first data experiences

Google has announced that it will be removing third-party cookies for 2023 so it’s important to look at alternatives. You could start by increasing your efforts to gather and fully exploit your first-party data. The success of your CRM system relies on data that helps to drive your personalisation of the

customer experience. These systems are evolving to enable you to capture information from all your customer data touchpoints, thereby providing you with a 360-degree view of your audience. This allows you to provide a more bespoke service, valuable content and improved customer support.

You should also look to strengthen your relationship with partners such as media publishers and tech giants to gain access to their data insights. Without third-party cookies, it’s also time to look at cohorts such as Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which enables you to target your ads to groups without needing details on individual users.

Left: Regularly adapting your marketing strategy can unlock the potential of your spa to attract and make an impression on guests

4. Create quality content

Gone is the day of content produced solely for SEO. Instead, invest in quality content that offers value to your customers, speaks in your brand voice and satisfies their search intent.

Did you know that Google has human quality raters who assess the standard of search results? Their guidelines are based on E-A-T (expertise, authority and trustworthiness). They matter because they form the backbone of what Google algorithms are trying to achieve and can influence how your business is found and seen.

Short-form video content currently makes up 82% of all internet traffic and will continue to dominate. Interestingly, even if you just include the word ‘video’ in the subject line of your email, you can increase your open rate by up to 19%!

5. Social media shopping

E-commerce has become a vital revenue stream for apps such as Instagram during the pandemic and searches for ‘Instagram shopping’ have increased 78% over the past five years. Now watch out for the advent of live-stream shopping – a trend that’s taken off in China and is expected to grow worldwide. Similar to QVC but likely to be hosted by influencers, this is a good way to increase your influencer marketing strategy and see direct returns as well as to improve awareness of your brand.

Customer service is also seeing more activity on social media platforms with about a third of consumers preferring to interact this way. However, make sure your response time is prompt as users expect an answer within an hour!

After a decade and a half in consumer public relations, 16 years ago Tracey Stapleton began to specialise in spa and wellbeing. Now managing director of The Spa PR Company, she offers a targeted range of PR and marketing services to spa and hotel operators as well as beauty andwellbeing product brands and services. www.thespaprcompany.com