Brand Day London: driving innovation with user-generated content at NH Hotel Group.
For NH Hotel Group, being in the hospitality industry means customer experience is embedded in every function of the business. At Brand Day London, Olapic presented with client NH Hotel Group to tell the story of how the hotel chain brought customers into its marketing by leveraging user-generated content.
With the overwhelming surplus of content online and increasingly circuitous customer journeys, modern brands have to continuously improve how they build connections with customers. As Jose de Cabo, co-founder at Olapic, described in his presentation, “There are hundreds of different touchpoints for each customer today. You can become an advocate of a brand even before becoming a customer which is quite powerful.”
Building strong customer connections has a ripple effect
Olapic helps brands access, manage and measure customer images and videos in every touchpoint. While most brands have traditionally outsourced content creation to agencies, today it’s increasingly happening in-house and at the hands of the customer. “The consumer has to have the opportunity to create content because often they can tell the brand’s story as well as the brand,” explained Cabo. The belief that customers deserve an active role in content creation is one shared by customers themselves: consumers trust images from other consumers on social media 7x more than advertising.
NH Hotel Group kicked off its UGC strategy in 2015 when head of social media, Juan Andrés Milleiro, saw an opportunity to start leveraging UGC in place of stock photography. At that time, the hotel brand started a manual process of requesting rights to user imagery and incorporating it across channels. When they tested the engagement rate over stock photos, UGC outperformed brand imagery on every social platform.
Go farther together
With over 400 hotels across 30 countries, 2.4 million social followers and marketing teams all over the world, Milleiro recognized that in order to stay innovative, NH Hotel Group needed to scale their UGC strategy. To do this, they enlisted in Olapic’s help, which turned out to be a collaborative, fruitful relationship. “We found Olapic and it was a perfect marriage,” said Milleiro, “it started to make sense and give us some speed and make us more agile.”
Through the use of Olapic’s earned content platform, NH Hotel Group was able to incorporate UGC across brands more efficiently, identify visual triggers for content creation, and build a short-form video strategy. The relationship has been mutually beneficial, as Cabo pointed out, “In the end, what we’re doing is building, collaborating and co-creating with our customers to build solutions as their needs for content evolve and change.”