How Best Western drove more than $980k in media value with Aspire

Find out how Best Western implemented Aspire to grow and manage their influencer marketing program and significantly reduce busywork for their small team.

$980k media value
10.5m impressions
126 creators

“With Aspire, we finally found a tool that we love. It fits our needs, our goals, our objectives, and it works really well.”
- Joelle Park, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at BWH Hotels

About BWH Hotels

BWH Hotels is a global hospitality enterprise comprising three hotel companies, including WorldHotels, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, and SureStay Hotels. The global enterprise encompasses roughly 4,300 hotels in over 100 countries, united by a deep commitment to delivering exceptional experiences and exceeding guest expectations. Best Western Hotels & Resorts continues to regularly receive industry awards and accolades, including the No. 2 Midscale Hotel Brand by Business Travel News and the Lodging Partner of the Year by AAA®/CAA®.

Challenge

Changing marketing needs require more efficient systems

BWH Hotels managed an influencer marketer program with a small, agile team that they wanted to continue to grow. To help the program become more robust, the team needed tools to help manage and evaluate in-and-outbound partnership queries and collect content deliverables. A large amount of outreach was conducted via email and direct messaging with creators. Once onboarded, creators produced and posted a significant amount of content, often on weekends. To capture and repurpose the large volume of content, BWH Hotels employees found themselves working seven days a week to manually collect and track creators’ output.

To streamline their process, the BWH Hotels team evaluated a wide variety of influencer marketing platforms. Aspire stood out from the pack with powerful and unique features that could save the team valuable time. Interactions with creators could be streamlined with customizable partnership applications, creators could be vetted more effectively using reliable audience authentication tools, and manual content collection could be automated with Aspire’s content capture abilities.

“We’re a pretty small, nimble team that does a lot. Having a tool that would capture all that content for us means a teammate or I don’t have to be working seven days a week.”
- Joelle Park

Solution

Increasing influencer program output, while reducing busy work

With Aspire, Best Western was able to begin shifting focus from outbound to inbound leads. With plenty of guidance from their dedicated customer service representative, they set up multiple application forms for potential partners. Now, more time and effort can be spent on assessing if a creator is the right fit for the brand, among other higher-leverage pursuits.

Aspire’s audience authenticity tools also allow Best Western to look deeper, beyond surface-level volume metrics like engagement or audience size. One creator had an audience of roughly 3m followers and high engagement metrics, but Aspire was able to identify differentials in post versus Story engagement that raised a red flag internally. Being able to see that at a glance spared the team significant time and financial investment.

Tools to capture content automatically also significantly alleviated the need for time-sensitive and time-intensive manual captures of each creator’s content. This allowed the team to expand the amount of creators that they were able to manage.

Best Western’s team can now manage more influencers in the same amount of time. They are also able to get better insights into how influencer marketing as a strategy performs by tracking and associating media value with impressions and creators.

“Our entire process—from onboarding to reporting—is now facilitated in Aspire. Everything aside from booking is done entirely through the platform.”
- Joelle Park

Results

Aspire provides leverage for a small team to make a significant impact

By implementing Aspire, Best Western’s marketing team was able to rapidly scale its influencer marketing program and reduce time-consuming, low-impact work. With new tools in place, the team could prioritize efforts that drive more business. The results speak for themselves.

Last year, using Aspire resulted in:

$980k in media value
10.5m impressions
Active influencer roster of 126+ creators
Time savings of 10-15 hours per week

Learn more about building efficient influencer marketing programs with Aspire.

“We can do more internationally with affiliate offices that didn’t have the bandwidth or support in the past.”
- Joelle Park