How Expedia Cruises thrives locally through on-brand organic & paid social media marketing

Overview

Since 1987, Expedia Cruises has been an industry leader in air, land and sea vacation sales across North America, and is backed by the most powerful travel brand in the world – Expedia.

Expedia Cruises provides travel agency franchise opportunities for those wanting to provide unrivaled travel expertise and exceptional value, for travelers in their community.

Impression growth on social over 6 months

+81%

Engagement growth over 6 months

148%

Growth of content published over 6 months

At Expedia Cruises, we know how critical online visibility is for growing local sales. That’s why we’ve chosen PromoRepublic to help our Vacation Consultants post on-brand organic and paid content and target it to local communities. We analyze performance and improve our social strategy by tracking results across thousands of social accounts in one dashboard.

James De Chavez

Senior Manager, Brand Marketing at Expedia Cruises

Corporate Office

Travel Agency

Vacation Consultant

Challenges

On-brand online presence

Expedia Cruises aimed to ensure that corporate and vacation consultants stay consistent when communicating the brand’s story on social media and other digital channels. To achieve that, they were looking for a tool that would provide easy access to on-brand content and allow oversight of the social media posts going out.

Local targeting for paid social

The corporate office aimed to arm every location with a tool to grow visibility and engagement across local audiences with localized messaging. As franchisees manage advertising budgets by themselves, they needed a simple tool for promoting localized social media posts on their own.

Solution

The Social Hub provided by PromoRepublic became the unified social marketing platform used across 300+ locations and 5,000 consultants, as well as the corporate team. The platform’s workflow and permission structure reflects the established approval processes within the organization.

Digital Asset Manager

Asset Manager is an easy tool for uploading, sorting, and storing branded content. A corporate team ensures brand consistency by distributing content across all locations and setting up specific permissions to manage and localize content while keeping all other assets untouched.

Organic Social Media Campaigns

The corporate team utilizes PromoRepublic to keep franchisees and Vacation Consultants in line with the marketing calendar and to bring all important campaigns to the forefront.To get higher reach, the head office organizes time-sensitive campaigns for locations to approve and join in on. This ready-made content can be labeled and later tracked for performance metrics.

Post Boosting

As their franchisees pay for ads at their own cost, they needed an easy tool to target people in their area. To help agencies attract people with hyper-localized content, we enabled zip code post boosting.

Moreover, users see educational pop-ups throughout the payment process to make the right decision.

Insights on Social Media Marketing

By tracking social media and сontent performance in one single dashboard, the head office can now ensure that the visibility of agencies and Vacation Consultants is growing.

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