The luxury challenge

As Jessie explains, Jacada specialises in bespoke, high-end trips and is also committed to more sustainable and responsible tourism. 

“Sustainability can have quite a bad reputation when it comes to luxury. They don’t seem synonymous,” she says. “So, we have to be very careful to tell stories which enable people to connect with those discussions and issues, without feeling like they’re compromising on the experiences they’re after.”

The secret to achieving that balance comes from rewriting the narrative of how sustainability initiatives can positively benefit the clients’ experience.

Jessie elaborates: “It’s about making sustainability an asset rather than a compromise. One of the key ways we do that is to focus on the experience customers can have as a result of sustainability initiatives. For example, there may be some great low-impact agricultural initiatives which are good for the environment, and for the customer we show how that results in fantastic farm-to-table dining and access to local cuisine.”

How then can luxury marketers bring these experiences to life? The answer is in producing the right content in the right format.

Using visual storytelling

One approach advocated by Jacada is using video to engage audiences, build emotional connections, and promote their positive impact. 

“Video is hugely important for us because it allows us to immerse the customer and give them a sense of what they might experience,” Jessie says. 

“When it comes to positive impact storytelling, there can be a real conflict between how we want luxury to make us feel, compared to sustainability — but video storytelling allows us to demonstrate that they’re not mutually exclusive. We can talk about conservation and look at the customer’s immersion in that as something positive and not at all uncomfortable.”

Hyper-personalisation

Of course, every customer is different — some of those looking for luxury want to avoid thinking about their carbon footprint, whereas others actively seek experiences with robust eco-credentials. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to luxury marketing. And the solution to this challenge is personalisation.

It’s an approach Jacada Travel has honed to a fine art, with its website and social media channels supported by hyper-personalised channels like email newsletters which allow richer personalisation through segmentation. 

“We share content and media which is going to resonate with that individual,” Jessie explains. “It’s about the specific locations they’re interested in, about who they are, whether they’re interested in family travel or a slower pace, and so on. We leverage the imagery and video we have to immerse them in the experience of that trip, well before they go on it.” 

This in turn poses some practical challenges. How do you get that tailored content to the right people in the right places and at the right time? In fact, luxury marketers are facing a growing bank of content, with demand only set to grow further — Canto’s State of Digital Content report found 77% of marketers expect demand for content to grow in the coming year.

Organisation and efficiency

To tell your luxury brand story successfully, you need tools which streamline content creation and distribution. Jacada Travel uses Canto as its digital asset management (DAM) solution.

“We use Canto and it’s phenomenal,” Jessie says. “Our content goes on a real journey — our people come back from properties with so much content, so many videos and photos. We make sure those are uploaded to our DAM system, tagged and organised so we can find them. They’re all edited, approved, and put into shorts or social media posts, our website and email. It’s a huge operation and a lot of tech goes into it.”

A DAM platform like Canto also enables seamless content sharing with external organisations like agencies and the media, with simple and secure controls over which content is available to which people.

“We keep everything nice and tight in Canto — we have some permanent portals and some links that expire. Our external PR has a bank in Canto which they know they can dip into. We also have a variety of different usage rights across our properties, and there are a lot of risks involved, so it helps us manage it really well,” concludes Jessie.