The challenge

Club Med are an international all-inclusive travel company who came to Rise at Seven in the middle of a global pandemic which froze almost all travel abroad. They wanted to improve their backlink profile as well as create a positive buzz on social media around the brand after a tough few months. They wanted to push the boundaries of their current marketing and create a fun, viral story. And that’s what we did.

The idea

Every year around Christmas a particular festive snack picks up lots of attention in the press: the humble Chocolate Orange. We wanted to give travel journalists a fun visual story to break up the monotony of negative news in the industry, so we created the Chocolate Orange hotel room. First of its kind, the design team mocked up the hotel room which we presented on the website. We chose to outreach the campaign at the beginning of October, just before the yearly spike of interest in Chocolate Orange. We knew that this concept would be quirky enough to prick the ears of the publications we wanted links in. We were right.

The results

Our campaign managed to build positive buzz around the brand and went viral on social media, picking up over 140k social engagements. It picked up global press in 16 countries, generating 115 links through to the Club Meb website, and pulling 193 customers from the campaign page to the booking pages. Yahoo, The Mirror, TimeOut, MSN, The Sun, Metro, and Travel + Leisure all linked to the campaign page, and the story went so viral we had journalists approach us to run the story. Club Med also saw increased visibility for 42 ski related keywords since the campaign launch and average ranking improved from 9.5 to 8.4.

Go viral? Check. Build high quality links? Check. Create a positive buzz around a travel brand in the middle of a pandemic? Check.