The Junto
The Project
The Junto, Columbus’ first lifestyle hotel, opened in the summer of 2023 and tasked Inspire with marketing its three distinct restaurants – Brass Eye, Little West Tavern and Maudine’s – to central Ohio influencers and food bloggers.
When working with The Junto to help promote their opening food and beverage concepts, Inspire recognized a need beyond media relations to help get the word to the central Ohio community about these restaurants. Inspire has strong relationships with local food and lifestyle influencers and recommended engaging with both individual influencers and hosting a group event to promote the new concepts.
To create the most impact, Inspire worked with the Columbus Food Bloggers group to host “Shake the Hand that Feeds You,” a tour and meet-and-greet with the food and beverage leadership team at Brass Eye, Little West Tavern and Maudine’s. In addition, Inspire coordinated return visits with each guest and planned other one-off individual influencer visits.
This campaign was created to position the restaurants at The Junto as individual destinations to people in central Ohio beyond guests of the hotel. Inspire determined that utilizing a mix of macro and micro-influencers was key to connecting with a variety of audiences interested in the hotel’s concepts.
The Results
Throughout Inspire’s work with The Junto over four months, the restaurants received over 200 mentions in posts and stories with an audience of over 680,000 viewers.
Inspire engaged 19 different influencer partners between the Columbus Food Bloggers event and independent visits. Due to Inspire’s intentional research and identification process, every influencer was extremely excited about their visits, and nearly every partner shared significantly more content than they were expected. The influencers continued to use their content for weeks, with many including it in monthly roundups or other coverage throughout the summer.
The Columbus Food Bloggers event specifically received 79 posts and stories with an audience of 173,000. For the return visits from the event, the 15 influencers shared 60 posts and stories with an audience of 145,000 users.
While Inspire hosted a total of 19 influencers across events, additional organic content began coming in from other influencers interested in the experiences after viewing content from the planned influencer partners, adding to the buzz surrounding the restaurant concepts.
As The Junto, Brass Eye, Maudine’s, and Little West Tavern opened to the public, each concept received its own media buzz and excitement around the opening. Each restaurant saw patrons outside of the hotel come into the concepts, which continued to be a large audience for them post-opening. Including influencer engagement and media coverage, Inspire secured over 400 mentions for Brass Eye, Maudine’s and Little West Tavern with an audience of over 616 million.