Thornbury Castle | Hotel & Hospitality

An influencer marketing project designed to showcase a multi-million-pound makeover of a one-of-a-kind destination.

Thornbury Castle is the only Royal Tudor castle that is now a luxury hotel. Once the country seat of Henry VIII, this Relais & Châteaux retreat channels 1530’s grandeur with contemporary luxury in a way that no other hotel can match.

Our brief was to design an influencer outreach campaign to draw attention to a recently completed multi-million-pound programme of upgrades and restoration.

Naturally, we looked to work with influencers whose audience profiles were a good fit for the hotel. As a prerequisite we looked for an alignment in terms of affluence, interests (food, countryside, history) and a propensity to take luxury domestic breaks. We also searched for those whose style and content would sit comfortably with the Thornbury brand and deliver above average levels of engagement. In practice this meant that the only practical way to identify candidates was to handpick them. Once candidate lists had been established, audiences validated and interest ascertained we managed contracts, travel arrangements and monitoring of outputs.

We organised collaborations with a total of six influencers whose IG following ranged from between 40K – 800K followers but each of whom could bring something different to the campaign in terms of audiences, interests and story angles. Given the objective of the campaign which was to increase awareness and familiarity with the brand the key measurements for this campaign were impressions and reach. The resulting output delivered a combined audience reach of over 1.5 million and over 2.0 million video views which is more than could have been achieved using the paid advertising tactics.