New UGC strategy helped Italian spa chain get more followers

The Italian spa and hotel chain QC Terme has gained more followers and a higher click-through rate since using Flowbox’s platform to collect and manage user generated content (UGC) in their marketing and on their website.

Feeling stressed? Take a break and head to Italy, to one of the QC Terme spa centers, where you can enjoy moments of escape and relaxation. QC Terme offers thermal baths, hotels and wellness in its centers and continues the philosophy of spa of Imperial Rome. Today, there are in total ten QC Terme spa centers and five hotels located in Bormio, Pré Saint Didier, Milano, Turin, Monte Bianco, Rome, San Pellegrino, Terme, Dolomites and Chamonix. Since September 2019, QC Terme uses Flowbox’s platform to collect and manage user generated content.

“We wanted to improve the relationship with our customers, being able to make content that truly affects them and keep up with their content expectations,” says Fabrizio di Giorgio, Digital Marketing Specialist at QC Terme.

Challenge
The company has been proactively engaging their community to share their spa experiences since the beginning. The team wanted at an early stage encourage their customers to keep creating content and started to spread the hashtag #qcterme. It didn’t take long until their customers started to post images on Instagram. As the number of images turned out to be higher than expected, the marketing team started to think of ways to get concrete business advantage from the user generated content. They wanted to find a method to activate the funnel of content from their community in terms of quality and use the content, UGC, in their own digital and social channels. 

“We were looking for a way to increase our brand awareness by growing our community. Our team also needed a way to spend less resources on creating, controlling and managing content, and to track the value of our content,” says Ingrid Boragine, Social Media Manager & Content Creator at QC Terme.

Solution
To leverage the power of the QC Terme community, Flowbox was implemented in September 2019 as a tool to easily collect and manage the content created by their customers. Through the platform, the team at QC Terme can access a content pool with a collection of images and videos created by their customers, which can be used in their marketing and digital channels, as well as in newsletters, on their website and in social media.

In Flowbox’s platform, the team can also engage with their community and comment directly on the most suitable posts while asking for the right to use the content in QC Terme’s own digital channels. Once the content is approved, the content is displayed on the website within specific category pages, depending on for example season and location. To further leverage the engagement on the content, a CTA button leading to QC Terme’s official Instagram account was also added to the UGC.

Results
Flowbox’s platform has made it easy for QC Terme to use content created by people in their community in a simple way. The user generated content has become an essential complement to their professional photos and a social proof that the spas look just as great in real life.

“It’s very time saving. We usually change the flows once per quarter according to the new season and the modify plan doesn’t take longer than one week,” says Ingrid Boragine and adds: “We saw how people are more likely to trust a recommendation if it comes from other people and that they are happy to be part of our website. In fact, we can say that when we are sending the rights requests, their response is positive 90 percent of the time.”

A new social wall will soon also be implemented under hotel destinations, connecting inspirational and authentic UGC with a CTA button which will lead the visitor to the booking page and thus help QC Terme to increase and track their sales.

Results in numbers
• During the peak time in December, the CTR has doubled compared to the previous 2 months.
• Increased traffic to the Instagram page with +60% CTR in 3 months starting from October 2019.
• The number of followers gained per month has doubled since using Flowbox.

More information:
Bianca Rior, Content Editor, Flowbox
bianca.rior@getflowbox.com