How Best Western generated $980k in earned media value with Aspire
Celebrating over 70 years of hospitality, BWH Hotels is a global enterprise comprising three well-known chains: Best Western Hotels & Resorts, WorldHotels, and SureStay Hotels. With 4,300+ hotels across 100+ countries, BWH offers 19 unique brands from economy to luxury, suiting the needs of guests in every market as each brand offers its own personality and style.
End-to-end influencer management is time-consuming, especially for lean teams
To expand their international reach, Best Western Hotels & Resorts turned to partnerships with creators across the globe. The biggest hurdle? Managing these relationships from end to end simply eats up too much time for a lean team. At a glance, Best Western had to manually:
- Identify and vet potential influencers
- Track and manage day-to-day communications
- Monitor content creation, then capture and distribute it
- Measure the performance and ROI of influencer collaborations
Tired of a scattered tech stack and repetitive steps, the hotel brand aimed to streamline influencer management ops and reclaim time for what matters most: strategy and relationship-building. That’s when they found Aspire.
“Our small team was balancing a lot on the influencer management end, so we looked for a robust inbound opportunity platform. When we tried Aspire, I finally found a tool that I loved — one that worked really well for our needs and goals.”
Aspire’s all-in-one platform streamlines every step of influencer management
Equipped with Aspire’s all-in-one platform, Best Western has been able to streamline and centralize every step of influencer management. Bryan Perleberg, Associate Director of Brand Marketing at BWH Hotels, attributes this game-changing improvement to the following functions of Aspire:
- Filter through thousands of creators — Using Aspire’s Influencer Search Engine, Best Western finds creators who are aligned on channels, branding, audience demographics, and more. Every profile also includes authentic performance metrics for easy vetting.
- Put day-to-day comms on autopilot without missing a beat — Aspire’s features for relationship management help Best Western onboard influencers, send contracts and terms, and even monitor hotel bookings — all in one location.
- Turn content management into a scalable process — By automating away the repetitive steps of content management, Aspire has helped Best Western save hundreds of hours on collection, organization, content reviews and approvals, and publishing. Now, each staffer can invest that time into managing one pod of creators and tracking individual progress.
- Prove the hard value of influencer partnerships — With measurement tools like sales-tracking links and an ROI dashboard, Best Western can report reliable numbers on influencer content performance over time.
Today, the Best Western team can focus on the higher-level strategy and nuances of influencer management, as opposed to repetitive day-to-day ops.
“Our entire influencer marketing process is now facilitated through Aspire. Almost everything is done on this platform.”
Saving 475+ hours a year, Best Western can invest in new global campaign strategies
According to Bryan, his team at Best Western has been empowered by Aspire to reduce costs and reclaim bandwidth. As a result, they’ve been able to make headway on one of their initial goals for influencer marketing: rolling out successful campaigns with creators across the globe.
As for the hard numbers, here’s a snapshot of what Best Western has accomplished with Aspire so far:
- $980,000+ of earned media value in one calendar year
- 475+ hours saved per year on creator management
- 10.5 million impressions generated
- 125+ influencer collaborations
With a successful and scalable foundation for influencer marketing in place, Best Western is ready to tackle more strategic global campaigns with ease.
“Aspire has helped us track conversions but also gain a nuanced understanding of our influencers’ impact. We can shift to a more PR-focused approach, gauging return on our efforts based on the media value of impressions and reach — on top of direct sales.”
