Thought Leadership Tracey Stapleton, The Spa PR Company
Five gold-standard marketing ideas for 2022
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Tracey Stapleton EXPERT CONTRIBUTOR
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 and wellbeing product brands and services. www.thespaprcompany.com
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his 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.
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.
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. 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.
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 www.europeanspamagazine.com