Staying Top of Mind Across the Nordics: How ESS Group Runs Always-On Influencer Marketing at Scale

About ESS Group: Scandinavian Hospitality With a Bold Entrepreneurial Spirit

Founded in Sweden in 2007, ESS Group is a Scandinavian hospitality company with 15 unique destinations, including hotels, restaurants, a country club, and a ski resort, spread across Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Each property has its own distinct identity, from Ellery Beach House, Stockholm’s only beach resort, to the boutique Hotel Bellora in Gothenburg, to the mountain-facing Fyrì ski resort in Norway. What unites them is a shared belief, captured in the group’s tagline, that the best guest experiences are built by people, not buildings.

The group's portfolio extends beyond hotels to the ESSOESS, a luxury yacht docked in Palma de Mallorca and available for charter through the Balearic Islands, but influencer marketing is focused entirely on the hotel and resort properties. At group level, influencer marketing strategy is led by Philip Björck, Head of PR & Socials, who works with local marketing teams embedded at each hotel. It’s a decentralized structure that puts day-to-day creator relationships in local hands, while Philip sets the strategic direction and keeps tabs on activity and performance across the portfolio.

The Challenge: Staying Consistently Visible Across 15 Very Different Destinations

Influencer marketing in hospitality operates differently from most product categories. There are no seasonal launches, no new collections, no hero SKUs to build campaigns around. The goal is something subtler and more continuous: staying relevant, staying visible, and staying top of mind for the right audiences at the right moments.

For ESS Group, that challenge is multiplied across 15 properties, each with different target audiences, seasonal peaks, and competitive contexts. A ski resort in Norway targets a different traveler than a boutique city hotel in Gothenburg. Steam Hotel, a spa and wellness destination outside Stockholm, needs creators whose followers are primarily Swedish. Fyrì Resort in Hemsedal draws from across the Nordics.

Managing inbound collaboration requests, identifying the right creator profiles, tracking performance across dozens of monthly activations, and reporting results to commercial and leadership teams, all of this was difficult to do at scale without the right tools.

The Strategy: Always-On, Always Local

Unlike brands running discrete campaign bursts, ESS Group operates on a continuous model. The group builds its influencer activity on a yearly basis, with each hotel running its own stream of creator collaborations across 12 months.

"We are not working with influencer marketing the way a clothing brand would, with a very clear goal for a new collection," Philip explains. "We use influencer marketing primarily for awareness and to stay top of mind and relevant."

Activity scales with the season. At Steam Hotel, for instance, the team ramps up collaborations in spring and summer when demand for leisure travel peaks. But the calendar never goes quiet.

ESS Destinations attracts creators who are genuinely motivated by the experience rather than the fee. Therefore creator partnerships are mostly barter-based. This keeps collaboration volumes high without inflating the budget. The group does also work with paid partnerships and, more recently, has begun experimenting with unique affiliate links for creators who have visited a property multiple times and have built a genuine connection with the brand. 

"In this case, we use creators who have visited us before, so there’s a trustworthiness with their followers. Maybe it’s their fourth visit in the last 24 months," says Philip. "So we try to get the creators who are genuinely connected with us."

Creator Selection: Hyper-Local by Design

With so many inbound requests landing across 15 destinations, one of ESS Group’s most important needs is the ability to quickly filter out the wrong profiles and validate the right ones. The creator range is broad, from UGC-style nano creators to some of the largest profiles in the Nordics with around a million followers, but audience geography is non-negotiable.

At Steam Hotel, for example, the team requires that close to at least 80% of a creator’s following is based in Sweden, depending on the size of the following. For Fyrì Resort in Norway, the relevant audience spans the broader Nordic region. For destinations with UK-facing ambitions, UK follower traction becomes a criterion. The logic is straightforward: a creator with a beautiful feed but the wrong audience geography brings very little commercial value in the hospitality context.

Because ESS Group is in the fortunate position of receiving a high volume of inbound collaboration requests, speed and accuracy in vetting are essential. The team can’t afford to manually research every profile that reaches out.

Kolsquare’s Role: From Fast Vetting to Group-Wide Reporting

Kolsquare sits at the center of how Philip and the hotel marketing teams manage creator relationships, campaign tracking, and performance reporting. The platform supports both the strategic and operational layers of the work.

Creator discovery and audience vetting

The team uses Kolsquare’s search and discovery functionality to identify new creator profiles, applying filters for follower count, interests, language, gender, and city. This structured approach helps cut through a high volume of potential profiles and find those that genuinely match a given destination’s audience criteria.

For quick triage of inbound requests, Philip relies on Kolsquare’s Chrome extension to get instant audience data directly from a creator’s Instagram profile.

"The Kolsquare widget in Chrome is awesome," he says. "You go into the profile’s Instagram grid and the data appears on the right side. It’s a quick look, but for us it’s essential. If it says 35% following in Brazil, we can straight away say no."

Campaign structure and creator management

Over the past year, ESS Group has moved beyond using Kolsquare purely for discovery and into building out full campaign structures for each destination. Each hotel now has its own campaign in the platform, organized by year, giving local marketing teams a clear overview of active and upcoming collaborations and allowing Philip to check in on activity levels across the portfolio.

The platform also serves as a shared record for creator history. If a collaboration has gone poorly at one property, it gets flagged in Kolsquare so that other hotels in the group can see it immediately.

"We can mark creators in Kolsquare, so when they contact another hotel, the marketing team can see straight away that the collaboration didn’t go well and decide whether to follow up or simply decline," Philip explains.

Reporting to leadership

For Philip, one of the most valuable functions Kolsquare provides is making the results of influencer activity tangible for the people who control the budget.

"For our commercial managers and CEOs who may not see all the day-to-day work, the reporting is the most important thing," he says. "Just to show them: these are all the publications we’ve made, this is the earned media value, this is how many collaborations we had, this is the target group we actually reached. It’s good not just for us, it’s good for the whole commercial team and for leadership."

The reporting also plays a critical role in justifying influencer marketing spend against other channels. Using EMV and CPM as benchmarks, Philip is able to demonstrate the relative cost-efficiency of creator collaborations compared to paid social advertising.

"People in marketing love data, but people who work with revenue or sales love it even more, and sometimes think marketing is just a cost," Philip notes. "So being able to show the actual results in terms of reach, CPM and EMV compared to other placements in the media mix is crucial to get everyone on board."

Kolsquare’s content collection functionality is another feature Philip highlights. By automatically collecting all publications from a campaign, including posts and videos across platforms, the team can review content quality and confirm that what creators are delivering aligns with the brief, without having to manually track every post.

Results: A Scalable Model That Keeps 15 Destinations Relevant Year-Round

The always-on model ESS Group has built means that creator activity is running continuously across the portfolio. At the busiest destinations, that means 20 to 40 collaborations a month. For the group as a whole, it adds up to a consistent stream of authentic, locally resonant content feeding awareness across the Nordics.

The campaign structure in Kolsquare has given teams a clearer framework for tracking what’s happening and sharing what’s working. Biweekly internal meetings between hotel marketing teams and the group level allow best cases to surface: a collaboration that drove strong engagement, a creator whose audience matched perfectly, a seasonal activation that outperformed expectations.

Recent experiments with affiliate links at Steam Hotel, using creators who have built genuine familiarity with the property over multiple visits, have already shown strong early results. It’s a direction the group plans to develop further, extending the link between creator content and measurable commercial outcomes.

The integration with Kolsquare has also expanded. ESS Group now has Google Analytics, its social media management tool, and Kolsquare connected, creating a richer picture of how creator-driven content contributes to overall marketing performance.

"With new AI integrations with Kolsquare, we will have it all: Google Analytics, our social media management tool, Meta Ads and Kolsquare," Philip says. "The reports you can get from that combination are just mind-blowing."

Want to manage creator partnerships at scale across multiple destinations or locations? Book a demo with Kolsquare and see how data can power your always-on influencer strategy.