In our previous article, we learnt about the Marketing Strategy of OYO, which is one of the most famous hotels in the hotel industry it was initiated as a small start-up company and now it has gained demand as a massive company in the hospitality sector.
In this article, we will learn about the marketing strategy of Saffronstays – Where Families Bond. The main objective is to help you to understand how SaffronStays have started with one homestay in 2016, and now it has grown into a most recognized business with 200 properties over on board as it created a demand for private villas for private homestays.
As we all know that marketing plays a vital role in this online world. As users go across digital in the world, marketing is becoming a key aspect of the business. If you are interested to know more about Digital marketing then, you need to go through the IIDEs Free Masterclass on Digital Marketing by our CEO and Founder, Karan Shah.
In this blog, we will be going to learn about the Marketing Strategy of SaffronStays in detail. Before going through it let’s learn about the company’s story, target audience and digital presence in detail.
About Saffronstays – Company Overview
SaffraonStays was started by Tejas Parulekar, a Chartered Accountant with his Husband Devendra Parulekar. SaffronStays started out as homestays in April 2014 and received over 1,000 listings in just six months.
By February 2015, they had launched commercially. and were doing brisk business. However, the challenge they faced was the quality of the homestays themselves. Because there is no industry-wide standard for quality, the team realised that customers frequently hesitate to make reservations.
During this time, they were approached by homeowners who wanted them to operate their homes as well as market them. Tejas first started her business with their flagship property in November 2015.
It was known as The Parsi Manor which is a 120-year-old British colonial era. After that, they never looked back now they manage 11 luxury homes, including villas and two heritage homes.
Currently, there are an estimated 200,000 Families and ten times as many Families in India. The vast majority own second houses and ancestral residences.
Over the next five to six years, the team hopes to add 1,000 premium vacation homes to their network. For the current year, they are expecting to report Rs 50 crore in revenue. SaffronStay’s only motive is to reach the target of up to Rs 100 crore in the next three years.
From a Sustainable stay at Glasshouse Celeste in Uttarakhand to a Hobbit village in New Zealand – inspired Asanja Villa in Maharastra, SaffronStays is a unique property on board.
| CEO | Devendra Parulekar |
|---|---|
| CMO | Manvi Sharma |
| Area Served | India |
| Industry |
Travel and Tourism Accommodation and Hotel-Villas & Homestays |
| Market Share/ Revenue | $2.0M – $5.0M |
| Vision | Establishing Villas, Holiday homes, Vacation rentals, Cottages, Exotic estates & Homestays on rent across multiple destinations in India |
| Tagline | “Where Families Bond” |
Marketing Strategy of Saffronstays
Let us have a look at the fantastic marketing strategy of Saffronstays. We will look into its marketing campaigns, SEO strategies, etc.
Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning
The target audience is families who want to spend quality time with their families in villas and homestays. It was started in 2016 but it took a drastic change after the post – covid as social distancing was one of the priorities of the targeted audience. SaffronStays offered Homestays with all the comforts of a hotel with added privacy and security for the audience.
SaffronStays saw a drastic change in changing the point of view of people over homestays compared to before 2019 and after 2020 because due to covid most people looked at private villas and homestays; when compared to hotels as they are safer in case of constant sanitisation and the gap between the two bookings to sanitise the villas and certainly knowing that there no outsiders in the villas.
SaffronStay’s focused on all age groups as everyone prefers to spend the vacation with their family in the villas and homestays. The brand segmentation was between the age groups 20-60 years old as the age of this group prefers to spend more time with their families when they get holidays or leave.
And nowadays it has become famous to celebrate functions, marriages or get together in villas with close friends or family members or with office colleagues.
Most of the villas are within drive distance from Mumbai and Pune. While at the start families opted for it, now there is a demand for expanding for celebrations and corporates too. People want to have intimate celebrations against naturally picturesque backdrops and they provide end-to-end services for that.
They even hosted many birthdays, anniversaries and weddings so far. Regarding corporates, people want to take a break from the work-from-home headache, even if for a bit. And SaffronStays are perfect for overnight stays for small-to-medium-sized teams.
But at the start of its business, it only provided services in Mumbai and Pune because most of the villas were near Mumbai and Pune but after the post covid, it started providing services all over India as the demand for the villas and homestays increased segmented their properties all over India so that they can provide services to everyone.
Now we can see everywhere SaffronStay’s new villas and homestays all over India with amazing services to their customers. Pre-covid, vacation homes were at the awareness stage; but after the post-covid; they have increased in demand for all the above reasons.
The procurement of sanitisation chemicals, equipment or masks, and gloves; the procedure that has been undertaken by the homestays at the time of booking and at the time of check-in, while preparing food and so on.
In fact, they even sent universal URLs to the guests so that they will be allowed contactless check-in, and relied on online payments so that it will make the work of guests easy and simple.
SaffronStays made its positioning by positioning villas and homestays in multiple destinations across India which will help people for celebrating with their loved ones or staying overnight with the team members to refresh their minds from stressful work at home.
Marketing Campaign of Saffronstays
SafronStays is India’s prime keeper of luxurious villas and homestays across India. Vivaa has campaigned with Saffronstays for Marketing campaigns. Vivaa has worked for over 6 months to create a PR campaign for SaffronStays that helps them to create their brand image as a spearhead in the luxury vacation sector.
From carefully organised trips for important media figures and influencers to help showcase and allow them to experience SaffronStays’s unique properties, to a comprehensive media campaign that incorporated various genres and types of publications. In order to achieve this, Vivaa assisted SaffronStays in becoming a major participant in the micro-hospitality industry.
SafronStays have grown immensely since its inception and has made huge strides in transforming the luxury vacation rental industry, but it lacked media exposure and a distinct brand image.
But Vivaa helped them by providing media exposure to them with SaffronStay’s major achievements. By exposing their role in the transformation of the luxury micro-Hospitality sector. And through creating a brand image that reflected the work and innovation of the founders.
A SaffronStay at Thal Beach, Alibaug
Vivaa identified key lifestyle influencers and beautifully organised weekend trips for them to select SaffronStay homes that they later shared on their social media. This opened SaffronStays into the hospitality space and brought them into the mainstream.
From creating and contacting an inspired group of individuals to beautifully coordinating all the logistics, Vivaa organised an experiential trip to a carefully chosen heritage property, Thanedar Estates, to give influencers a mesmerizing SaffronStays experience and build the goodwill of the brand.
To improve SaffronStays’ brand image and position, Vivaa has organised several experience tours for media and influencers. And also it helps the target audience to know more about the Saffronstays and the services they have provided to the guests. Through this, it will create a strong brand image in the audience.
SaffronStays are being highlighted by Vivaa in a variety of publications and media formats to expose them to a wider audience. Vivaa sought, ideated and executed over 60 media exposures including news announcements, feature stories, opinion articles and home reviews in four months that helped SaffronStays expand its presence in mainstream media.
To increase their audience and fame, Vivaa has finalised a podcast with the founders where they can discuss their experiences and viewpoints as well as a video shoot for Amazon TV’s business channel that shows the founders’ entrepreneurial path. And it also helped to create an image by promoting it through newspaper articles and magazines on it.
It featured in THE HINDU BUSINESS LINE, TIMES OF INDIA, HINDUSTAN TIMES, FINANCIAL EXPRESS, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, ZEE BUSINESS and more.
The campaign with Vivaa created a lot of brand image in the audience. The only motive of this campaign was to expose the SaffronStays to the target audience and it got successful through the strategy of creating articles on it and promoting it through the influencers on Instagram and other social media platforms.
It gave a good experience to the influencers so that they can share their lifestyle with the consumers.
The reason behind the success of the campaign was to create a brand image on social media and to expose them to media about their new announcements, feature stories, opinion articles, and home reviews to the consumer base.
Social Media Marketing
| 121K Followers | |
| 175K Followers | |
| 11K Followers |
SaffronStays are active on social media like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. SaffronStays has around 175k followers on Instagram and on Facebook, it has around 121k followers.
Even though it has an account on LinkedIn which has followers of around 11k as it is a professional sort of social media it has fewer followers compared to Instagram and Facebook.
Because most of the youth don’t have an account on LinkedIn in comparison to the other platforms in social media. They post content related to their promotional and informational and related to their newly launched villas or homestays.
SEO Strategies
SEO is an important aspect of digital marketing.
As per SEO Ranking number of keywords below 500 is bad, above 1000 is good, and above 10,000+ is amazing. As we can see from the above picture of the SaffronStays it has 82,000 organic keywords and it is considered amazing. That means we can say that SaffronStays is good at digital marketing in gaining a good number of insights.
Also, the traffic per month is around 1 lakh+ which is considered excellent. Hence we can say that SaffronStays is using great SEO Strategies to meet the line in Google organic SERP results.
Influencer Marketing
From the start of the business, SaffronStays collaborated with many YouTubers, Bloggers, Instagram influencers etc for their marketing promotions. They have many influencers with followers from 144k+ to 41k+.
Influencers promote their villas and Homestays through their social media posts and vlogs which will help SaffronStays to gain popularity among the target audience and increase their customers.
E-commerce Strategies
As we are talking about E-Commerce SaffronStays has a website where customers can book their villas online with online payments. It helps the customers make it simple by booking the villas online through their website with some exciting offers.
Mobile Apps
SaffronStays has a Mobile App of its own which makes it easy for customers to book villas and Homestays easily through their mobile. It gives every detail regarding food, rooms and how many guests are allowed and additional charges for meals. It gives information about guests’ check-in & check-out right from the app.
Content Marketing Strategies
SaffronStays is very active on social media. They post content on social media related to their new launch of villas, estates, homestays etc. The only source of posting content is Instagram, Facebook, blogs, Newspapers articles etc.
They also promote the press about their villas through various sources like THE HINDU BUSINESS LINE, ZEE BUSINESS, FINANCIAL EXPRESS, HINDUSTAN TIMES, TIMES OF INDIA and many more.
So this is the end of our blog on the marketing strategy of SaffronStays. Let’s get you through the conclusion of the above blog below.
Conclusion – What’s Special in Saffronstay’s Marketing?
After getting through this marketing strategy of SaffronStays. SaffronStays had gained a lot of love from customers in India through its services. As you all know nowadays spending time with your loved ones is not possible and easy at all but, SaffronStays are providing Villas and Homestays, cottages, vacation homes and exotic estates around India it making your trip amazing with families.
SaffronStays got more popularity after the covid as every customer wants safety measures to be followed them and the villas provide sanitisation after every booking and follow social distancing there will be a gap between every villa booking so that they clean up the space.
Not only that it got into the limelight due to its services and the way it organises the weekend getaways for people who want to refresh their busy schedule from working from home with their team workers.
It also organises events like birthdays, anniversaries and more events and who wants more than a private villa for their birthdays and anniversaries to spend private time with their families or to celebrate with them?
Also, we can see that after the pandemic hit there was a drastic change in the business every one started depending on online platforms and how digital marketing played a vital role in the business.
But when it comes to SaffronStays they were good at it they promoted well about their villas and business through media, blogs, and influencer’s stories and opinions and created their brand image among the customers but, they even need more effect on it so that they can promote their brand image over all the world.
And engaging with more marketing campaigns can grab the attention of the customers. It should create more content or exciting offers to the targeted audience through digital marketing platforms so that it can gain more attention from the audience.
Through digital marketing, effective campaigns can be designed and the scope of fixing any glitches on digital platforms is immediately done without any stress full burden.
With the increasing importance of digital marketing, learning about the growing field is an important step. If you would like to learn more about digital marketing and how it will help you throughout your career and to develop your skills, check out IIDE’s 4-Month Digital Marketing Course to learn more.
We hope this blog on the marketing strategy of SaffronStays has given you a good insight into the company’s marketing strategies.
If you like such in-depth analyses of companies, find more such insightful case studies on our IIDE Knowledge portal.
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