Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 16.10.2025 
Carousel reflect on their UK Social Media Awards win and what it means to the team.
Carousel are delighted to have taken home the travel & tourism category award for our campaign reinvigorating spa stay bookings for Buxton Crescent.
Buxton Crescent is a gorgeous Georgian era hotel in the heart of the Peak District which offers spa facilities that are unparalleled in the UK, as the only UK spa with a natural thermal spring water pool, alongside salt caves, saunas, steam rooms and much more.
Buxton Crescent hotel & spa, housed in a spectacular Georgian crescent, underwent a £70m renovation project in 2020, but struggled to capitalise on this relaunch opportunity due to pandemic timing. With the brand in need of a revitalising spa day of its own, Carousel was enlisted in summer 2024 to rejuvenate Buxton Crescent’s social media strategy in order to boost awareness and bookings.
We focused on creating compelling video content that would convince viewers to book a trip to Buxton over any of the North West’s other luxury spa hotels, so we coordinated content shoots that encompassed dynamic edit & filming techniques including dramatic drone flythroughs amongst the Georgian architecture, indoor-outdoor pool swim-throughs, pet’s eye view edits and POVs. This helped us achieve over 1.9m video views and over 100k engagements in the space of a year.
This campaign challenged us to optimise our organisational skills by meticulously planning a content shoot in a working luxury hotel without disturbing paying guests, working around logistical challenges to ensure we used production time efficiently. We arranged an overnight shoot to capture spa edits in the evening once guests had retired, arrived early to capture the breakfast buffet before guests descended, and coordinated with weather and sunset timings to capture stand-out drone footage timelapses. We also enlisted dogs to film content to appeal to pet owners, sourced Christmas crackers in mid-August for pre-planned seasonal content, navigated the camera challenges of capturing a lens-misting thermal pool, and challenged our cameraman to don swim shorts to film a POV transition through the hotel’s indoor to outdoor pool.
Throughout the season, we supplemented this content with additional mobile-captured content to tap into seasonality and trends. This spanned from highlighting bespoke Halloween themed cocktails to putting our spin on the ‘Teatime alarm’ spoof trend (which had gained such virality it was even mentioned by This Morning and the Gov UK account), with our interpretation showing a robe-wearing spa guest dashing to the afternoon tea dining area.
Meanwhile, we coordinated monthly gifted influencer stays with authentic local lifestyle creators to showcase the hotel’s USPs and offers in a natural, personalised style, with the top performing post generating 1.2 million organic Instagram reels views.
Likewise, we selected complementary brands like Rydale outdoor clothing and Peak Candles, which had a similar audience size, geographic basis and target audience demographics to Buxton Crescent, and coordinated monthly Collab contests to drive spikes in follower growth, reach and engagement, helping us to grow the brand’s audience by 63% in 9 months (over 16k new fans).
Alongside organic content, our segmented advertising strategy leveraged narrative-driven video edits designed to speak to each key audience demographic and maximise conversion rates, delivering an average ROAS of 5.74. Our tactical ad strategy worked in tandem with other digital advertising strands to optimise performance, including using LinkedIn’s newsletter feature to drive email sign-ups and repurposing this audience data for retargeting, driving click-through rates up to 4.08%.
Reflecting on the award win, Carousel’s Director of Social Media, Chloe Sharp, said:
“I’m delighted to see the team’s creativity and dedication reflected in this award win. Our approach demonstrated the true potential of social media when combining innovative content creation with clever advertising tactics, and matched timely trends with strategic brand and influencer partnerships. The team have worked hard to make sure every opportunity was seized, always looking to new trends we could incorporate or partners we could leverage. By massively over-delivering on our KPIs for both marketing aims (awareness, audience growth and engagement) and conversion targets, we have demonstrated a well- rounded strategy that is both eye-catching and effective, and I’m glad the team can reap the rewards of their hard work through this award win.”
Social Media Account Director Margarita McGrath added:
“We love working with a brand as prestigious as Buxton Crescent, and the award win has been a cherry on top of the success we’ve earned for the brand. Having delivered exceptional results for this campaign, in our second year we’re looking to build on these strong foundations by incorporating more bespoke campaign activations into our content strategy, such as tying into celebrations around Jane Austen’s anniversary to take advantage of the hotel’s Georgian heritage.”
Carousel is a PR, influencer marketing, events and social media agency with multiple UK & Global Social Media awards under our belt. We specialise in sectors including hotels & property; retail, luxury & F&B, festivals, arts & events; and toys, games & family.
If you’d love to hear how we’d reinvigorate your brand’s social media, just like we’ve done for Buxton Crescent, then get in touch here.
