Project Title: Website Design and Content Strategy for Island Acres Resort Motel
Background
We had the unique opportunity to work with Island Acres Resort Motel, a small mountain lodging property in Colorado, to reimagine their website design and digital marketing strategy. When we first met with the owners, they were still recovering from the financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and were looking to revamp their out-dated website.
Rather than simply creating a new website and leaving it at that, we proposed a plan to integrate the new website into a digital marketing strategy that would increase traffic to their new website and showcase the unique amenities of their property to help drive revenue back up to it’s pre-COVID levels.
Project Goals
The main goal of this project was to reimagine and rebuild the currently outdated website for Island Acres Resort Motel in Gunnison, CO.
As always, however, our goal as consultants on this project was to exceed the expectation of our client by not only meeting the main goal of rebuilding the motel’s website, but also using that rebuild as an opportunity to reimagine their digital marketing strategy.
Length of Project
In total, the bulk of the work for this project, which included the website redesign, spanned three months of work. But, the conversations and planning for that redesign started much earlier. Overall, we spent roughly a year working with this client to propose plans for the new website, establish and design the new site, and monitor the success of the marketing strategies we incorporated.
Associated Tasks
As always, our tasks for this project began with understanding our client’s business goals. We dove deep into what it was she hoped to accomplish with a new website and digital marketing strategy. The most important thing we learned during this phase was our client’s distaste for online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and Hotels.com. With the knowledge that our client had no interest in using OTAs for her digital marketing strategy, the task became to boost traffic to their new website to increase bookings directly from their site.
Once we understood exactly what our client wanted, we got to work mocking up a new site that incorporated our search engine optimization (SEO) goals for the site. With our client’s blessing and a staging site in place, we then proceeded with the following tasks for this project:
- SEO strategy
- Website redesign
- Google Analytics integration (for monitoring success of the new website and digital marketing strategies)
- Blog content strategy (including three “starter blogs” for the new site)
- Photography of the property
- Digital welcome guide design
Project Deliverables
In the end, we successfully delivered a brand new website designed with SEO to attract potential visitors to the Gunnison, CO area, where the motel is located. In the first season using the new website and digital marketing strategy, Island Acres experienced 35% growth in revenue, while lodging in the area was actually down 10%.
Website: https://islandacresresort.com
Inside the Sociology
We like to end each project report with a brief reflection on how sociology enabled the successful completion of the project. For this particular project, we got to use our sociological insights on hospitality and placemaking to craft copy that marketed an inviting, memory-making atmosphere to potential guests. We also leaned on our sociological understandings of digital marketing and the exploitation involved within it—especially as it relates to the domination of OTAs in digital marketing for hospitality businesses. In this case, our sociological knowledge allowed us to understand our client’s resistance to using OTAs and find a workaround that still increased business without also increasing the business’s susceptibility to exploitation by OTAs.
Overall, we are thrilled that our sociological insights and digital media and marketing strategy culminated in a successful new website and increase in revenue for our client!
