Glocal content strategy. -Managing the European social communications of one of the largest cruise companies in the world

Royal Caribbean

In 2017, Royal Caribbean set us the challenge of managing their social media in Europe, designing a multi-country content strategy that took into account the particularities of each brand and market (buyer persona and digital maturity).

Engagement and reputation: two complementary objectives.

In addition to taking into account the particularities of the different brands (Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Club Cruises) and markets (Spain, Italy, France and DACH), we had to meet a dual objective:

  • On the one hand, building a strong brand reputation among the different stakeholders to consolidate a long-term relationship, which was a priority for the communication department.
  • On the other hand, generating interest in the Royal Caribbean cruise experience, connecting with new customers and turning them into brand ambassadors, which was the priority for the marketing department.

We built a consolidated and coherent global digital presence for Royal Caribbean, as well as a closer relationship with its audiences.

Designing the traveller’s customer journey.

As this was an international project, we had to pay special attention not only to how users communicated, but also to how consumer habits varied in each country. Based on this analysis of the sector, the competitors and the cruise company’s own audiences, we built the customer journey of the Royal Caribbean traveller and defined the different buyer personas we were going to target.

A common direction.

But how could we ensure that an audience with such varied interests identified with our messages without losing focus? Once we identified exactly who we were addressing and in what context, we went on to design the social strategy for all the countries of Europe with the same common direction, but without ignoring local differences.

Moreover, we had to add an extra peculiarity to all the above. In addition to being multi-country, this project was also multi-brand: within the company we can identify two strong brands, Royal Caribbean Cruises and Celebrity Cruises. Each has its own communication guidelines, objectives, and buyer personas.

#CrusingDucks: Social monitoring to obtain insider knowledge on customers’ behaviour.

By reviewing social media activities, we discovered a viral challenge initiated by cruise passengers. The challenge consisted of playing “Hide-and-Seek” with rubber ducks. To analyze the scope of the challenge, we decided to go beyond our owned channels, and we turned to Brandwatch to monitor all social noise. The results were astonishing: several countries had participated in the challenge, and passengers had created their own private groups on Facebook to share their pictures.

Hence, Good Rebels and Royal Caribbean decided to take part in the challenge. For Royal Caribbean’s 50th Anniversary, 50 rubber ducks were hidden on a ship, each one of them with a personalised passport, fostering true engagement with our audience.

 

Local objectives based on digital maturity.

The particularities of each market go beyond content strategy. Digital maturity varies in each country, so we also had to take this into account when setting local objectives.

After two years of the project, the community in the different countries had increased significantly, doubling on Instagram in Spain and France, and multiplying by more than 10 in other markets such as Germany and Italy, and overall interactions increased by 154%.

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