The scenic route through social media strategy
Lake Shore Travel has us adding to our bucket list for our life’s biggest adventures. But first: social media strategy. Lake Shore brings the luxury touch to travel design for clients nationwide from their Chicago office. When we say luxury we mean luxury. With such insta-worthy content, we knew their social media was ready for a strategic framework that their beautiful destination content can fit into meaningfully.
Lake Shore’s dream collab
Lake Shore Travel came to us with a love and grasp for marketing that we love to see. Knowing they would be heavily involved with their marketing plans, we fully embraced where they were to set up a system that allows for remote teamwork. By creating a recurring production schedule conducive to open collaboration from all the travel agents, we’re able to be as connected or hands-off as they need at any time — making for a true partnership.
Another major part of what’s made this successful is employee engagement. We do collaboration posts and tag the travel advisors when relevant. Their audiences engage with those posts, which helps grow the overall brand and gives more visibility to the team’s expertise.
How Hapacity prepared for takeoff
Right away, Hapacity created a full year-long content calendar with monthly themes and subtopics for Lake Shore to review. After learning how collaborative Lake Shore wanted to be (yay!), we put an easy process in place for their individual travel agents to feel empowered using to share their travel photos. After establishing an organized and accessible Google Drive archive, our team was off and running – ready to bring the travel eye candy to life.
Every month since, they are able to use the prepared topic list as a springboard to percolate ideas based on their insider travel knowledge. Now that the monthly cadence is churning smoothly, Hapacity is able to take Lake Shore’s ideas and photos to build out a full calendar to collaborate on. Once finalized, Hapacity uploads and schedules each piece of content in our social media tool for final review and approvals. The results so far are nothing short of collaborative gold.
During our setup stage, we also established key social media topic pillars—like bucket list trips, advisor testimonials, and holiday content—so we can consistently educate and inspire their unique audience to take action.
Cruising
Once our baseline flow of working together and the yearlong plan was established, we started digging deeper with a robust plan for marketing wins. Our work together spans:
- Organic social media done to the nines with custom designed graphics, video creation, engaging captions and carefully researched hashtags to cater to different audiences across specific channels
- Community engagement, including responding to comments and DMs on their pages
- Boosting posts for extended reach
- Monthly performance reporting across all digital platforms, including their website
- A long-term content calendar
- Monthly social content outlines created with Lake Shore’s input
- Scheduled and managed posts in our social media software publishing tool
- Organized photo and video assets from team members
- Library maintenance of managing partner brand assets (e.g., Four Seasons)
- Management of logins to brand media libraries from their hotel and cruise partners
Our results
Beyond the numbers, our work together has also fostered:
- A repeatable system that works and makes it easy for agents to participate
- An organized collaboration that works for everyone
- Peace of mind that marketing is always taken care of
- Content that actually gets shared and seen
- A strategy that balances education, inspiration, and action
