India Social Case Challenge – Edition 1

Category-Long-term Initiatives

Title- Social media marketing for Mahindra Homestays

Share a little about your organisation

Mahindra Homestays is a unique Indian accommodation network. Launched in 2008, and initially targeting the UK and Indian tourist markets, it brings together a large number of premium family homes that have quality guest rooms.

The unique selling point of a Mahindra Homestay is that travellers receive an original experience in each one, and a more authentic, rewarding and ‘real’ experience of India than they might otherwise get in a hotel.

Executive Summary

Mahindra Homestays has quickly established itself as a digitally-literate, self-assured and colourful brand that relishes dialogue and collaboration with its audience. Through innovative blog content and social media initiatives we have built the necessary foundations for any travel brand looking for success in the modern online marketing environment.

Background

Once it was an exception to find a brand involved in social media. Now it is an expectation.

People want to find products and services using the familiar tools of their online travels: YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to name a few.

They want to talk with brands, discover information and explore a relationship. For brands, this is a powerful opportunity.

The obvious benefit of being involved in social media is exposure: directly, it’s a chance to market and create sales, sometimes immediate, sometimes years later – a way of capturing and developing an audience; indirectly, it’s a way of improving and building on search engine rankings.

For a new brand launching in India and in the UK we wanted to explore the exciting opportunities available to us through social media marketing.

Approach/ Strategy

Although the time and resources across different social media has varied throughout the initiative we have chosen to work under six guiding principles and we feel these values have aided our success.

• Be honest – we act responsibly and truthfully when representing our brand in social media
• Be interesting – we ensure we communicate worthwhile, engaging messages that people enjoy
• Be open – we communicate in an open, collaborative and sharing way with the people who engage with us
• Be dynamic – we strive to demonstrate innovation, originality, enthusiasm and a clear sense of purpose in communications
• Be committed – we are dedicated to keeping our activity regular, timely and relevant
• Be strategic – we plan and execute communications intelligently for maximum results

We’ve applied these principles across all the Mahindra Homestays social networks.

a) The India Travel Blog
We created a branded blog on the website, designed to draw traffic and ultimately send it to the main site. We developed content strategically to appeal to different target audiences and niches, from yoga lovers to dog owners interested in pet-friendly accommodation.

We used keyword techniques to capture search traffic on certain useful terms – particularly longtail keywords where we saw an opportunity to get plenty of success. And we used lively editorial to communicate the brand in an interesting way and encourage dialogue.

Our output over six months has included: 30 highly popular things-to-do articles covering key locations; features on Indian culture, history and traditions; stunning Indian photography collections; video tours of properties; original competitions and offers; and we have recently started podcasting. The blog receives 6,000 visitors a month.

b) Facebook
Strong social media assets create confidence among customers, especially in an unfamiliar brand and new product. We created an attractive Facebook page with intelligent use of apps and features and we set about finding our audience. With conversation and user-centric initiatives such as our Photo of the Month contest we have grown to 4,500 active fans. We use the Facebook page to seed our blog content, answer customer enquiries and push fans to the main site at any relevant opportunity.

c) Twitter
For us, being on Twitter was not simply a matter of following the trend. Early on we saw an opportunity to use Twitter in a powerful way to find our audience as they are making accommodation decisions. We developed a Twitter page which we use in much the same way as Facebook, to seed links to the Mahindra Homestays website and respond to discussion. But we also use it to build relationships with travel journalists, bloggers and travellers across the world. Our approach is proactive; time is spent, for example, searching for current conversations about ‘hotels in India’ or ‘flights to India’. When appropriate we step into discussions with useful and timely contributions.

d) YouTube
Our 26 videos including host-led tours of accommodation as well as a short Kerala travelogue from some well-regarded UK travel writers have brought over 21,586 views on YouTube. Mahindra Homestays videos dominate the search results on the leading keyword term ‘India homestays’.

Stakeholders

The stakeholders we engaged through the initiative were our homestay owners who are delighted that we have provided this platform to engage with their visitors and prospective customers.

Video has provided a great opportunity for the homestay owners to engage with the initiative, through a profile their property, giving viewers the opportunity to get a real insight into the homestay experience and get a taste of the hosts’ personality and the sort of hospitality they might receive.

About the initiative

Having created publically accessible channels for communication they are able to participate directly via Twitter and FaceBook.

We are in regular contact with homestay owners via email and telephone to provide regular updates about the initiative and how they can get involved.

Impact – Outcome

A) Blog: Traffic to our blog has been increasing steadily since launch and currently with over 6,000 visits per month. Almost half of this traffic has come via natural search engine rankings. With a new brand and targeting a new market (UK) we have been able to build brand awareness early on in the travel research process. For example, those searching for things to do amongst Indian destinations have a strong change of being exposed to the Mahindra Homestays brand. By offering useful destination content within a friendly community such as the blog enables us to reach our audience. We use Analytics on the blog which is fully customised to help us to measure the effectiveness of the blog.

Although all blog visitors are being exposed to the brand (we avoid selling on the blog) a key aim is for visitors to then explore the main Mahindra Homestays website. Currently 10-20% of all blog visitors navigate to the main site and are more engaged that other types of referrals. For example, a blog visitor spends 50% more time on the site and visits 35% more pages. We’re also delighted that blog visits lead directly to online bookings.

B) Twitter: It is harder to measure direct results with Twitter. We limit our time on Twitter to a four to six hours each month.

• Our links to new blog content have been retweeted by a number of high profile followers (such as Times Travel in the UK) that provides peaks in traffic.
• PR coverage – We do use Twitter to communicate with the travel trade. One follower had a request for accommodation coverage in Delhi and we were able to act upon this.
• Facebook: Each month we review the Insights stats that Facebook provides along with information provided through Google Analytics. One year on we’ve had 30,000 visits to our fan page.

A year after the launch we asked our fans whether they would be more likely to choose a Mahindra Homestay when travelling in India compared to 12 months ago and all responses were positive.

Learnings

Social media (along with search) marketing has become a key part of our online marketing strategy. We are relaunching the main Mahindra Homestays website later in and 2010 and we plan to better integrate our social media activity. For example, on http://www.mahindrahomestays.com/ we simply have buttons linking out to our blog, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr. The new website will include:
• Facebook fan box to show site visitors our presence
• Latest tweets from our Twitter stream
• Embedded YouTube videos
• RSS feeds from our blog

This tighter integration will go some way to show our website visitors the different platforms and communities outside the main website that will build stronger positive engagements with the brand.

Time spent on social media must be weighed up with results achieved and we strive to balance our resources across the different networks depending on which generates the best results.

What Next

We will continue to build our social media activity around the blog and look to integrate this activity more closely onto the main site when it is relaunched. Our aim is to continue to build the blog as a resource for travellers and to strengthen the community.

Reasoning

• It meets our business objectives to build awareness of a new brand across different country markets.
• We’ve seen steady sustained growth amongst our community networks (6000 blog visitors/month, +4500 Facebook fans, +2119 Twitter followers).
• Our initiative supports the community goals and encourages member interaction.
• We’ve utilised media depending on demographics and community needs. This includes videos, guest articles, image galleries, podcasts and competitions.
• Our approach is long term but allows us to maintain agility throughout.
• We have clearly defined goals and practices in place to assess whether these are met.

Credits Strategy

Dot Tourism (http://dottourism.com) is digital branding and online marketing specialist in the travel sector.

Credits Execution

Dot Tourism (http://dottourism.com) is digital branding and online marketing specialist in the travel sector.

Testimonials

Mahindra Homestays was recently announced winner of Wanderlust magazine’s Eureka – Travel Innovation award. We feel that the social media marketing initiatives have been a key factor in building awareness of the brand.

Our initiative was profiled in The Hindu Business Line – Septemer 2009.

Factsheet

Name of the company: Mahindra Homestay
Number of Employees: 11 to 50
Category: For Profit corporation
Case submitted by: Japa Ghosh-Head of Marketing
Website: http://www.mahindrahomestays.com