Project - Ali'i Resorts
For a luxury vacation rental company, digital appearance and the ability to captivate the attention of potential guests played a vital role in its business growth.
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As an external marketing team, we took a challenge to convey the incredible beauty and relaxed atmosphere of Hawaii, allowing people to forget about the business of every day and to touch a dream.
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Stunning visuals with a consistent voice of the company across multiple channels was our main approach to reflect Ali'i Resorts' passion for the islands and to highlight experiences they wanted to gift to their guests.
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The Client was extremely satisfied with their digital look and feel and received over 175% ROI.
​My responsibilities in the project:​
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briefing the team, workflow creation, setting up required tools for execution;
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reviewing the deliverables internally and receiving the Client's approval;
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creating a content calendar, writing, setting up and scheduling email newsletters, monitoring performance;
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paid ads management and performance monitoring;
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help desk support and website updates;
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blog development - content calendar, copywriting process management, blog publishing;
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account performance monitoring and monthly reporting.
Email Newsletters
Ali'i Resorts had a significant email database with over 20k subscribers. This was a competitive advantage of Ali'i Resorts and as a marketing team, we effectively leveraged it in marketing campaigns.
The Challenge: Like any email database, Ali'i Resorts' mailing list was an important source of loyal customers and potential guests, whom we had to keep engaged and motivated to book their stay. The challenge was in the seasonal nature of the business, matching the tone of voice of the emails to the brand voice and building trust to book luxury vacation rentals vs cheaper competitors' options.
Our Solution: We wanted to create topical content that would be interesting to read all year round, highlighting the experiences and making people look forward to their vacation in Maui. My suggested strategy was to conduct topic research and develop a content calendar covering bi-weekly events, experiences, seasonal activities and live on Maui. To match the content style, we usually re-purposed the content across different channels written by the same copywriter who knew the Client very well. To keep sales coming, we offered a discount for advanced booking encouraging people to secure their stay in the winter months, and added a block with testimonials to create more trust.
Client's Result: The Client was extremely happy with the email content and design. Advanced planning allowed us to have everything approved and scheduled ahead of time. Emails open rate on average was over 22.1% with a clickthrough rate of 2.86%, which resulted in several bookings monthly and thousands of dollars in revenue only from email marketing.
Blogging is a proven and strategic way to drive traffic to the website, especially in the travel industry. Thus, blog development was a non-negotiable strategy for this client. Our marketing team supported the Client with articles publishing on the website, as well as web updates & maintenance.
The Challenge: The Client did not have a tech team, therefore we usually helped with extensive website maintenance and update, which was highly technical due to the booking platform they used. This required additional learning and cooperation with the external dev team for complicated cases.
Our Solution: To make full use of the content, we repurposed blog articles for email marketing and social media. This also allowed us to speed up the content approval from the Client's side and left room for Ad-Hoc projects. We also created a helpdesk system for web maintenance, which usually was done by the Project Manager (me) and outsourced to the dev team if needed.
Blog Development &
Web Maintenance
Client's Result: Due to the advanced planning we consistently published blog articles twice a week, bringing most of the organic traffic 8.82K to the website through the blog. This allowed us to achieve ranking on the first page of Google for the search terms with 33K monthly searches.
All website updates and any issues were usually fixed within 24-48 hours due to the efficiency of the help desk system, giving the Client confidence and peace of mind that everything will be completed as soon as possible.
Social Media &
Digital Presence
Visual materials are crucial for the tourist industry and the most engaging way to catch attention and creating engaging content is the most crucial step for attracting more customers.
The Challenge: Establishing a consistent look and feel of the social channels that match the brand, making content interactive, promoting vacation rentals and being not too aggressive and superficial with sales were the challenges we had to overcome.
Our Solution: Creating appealing visuals was crucial for the brand, so we began by testing design options using Ali'i Resorts' existing materials while keeping their goals in mind. We sought out a writer from Maui who could best capture the essence of the island in the copy. To make property promotions more engaging, we chose to incorporate animations. Our final ideas were presented to the Client, and we moved forward with their preferred choice.
Client's Result: Ali'i Resorts received full management of 4 social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube) - covering content creation, scheduling and customer service. We improved the Ali'i Resorts YouTube channel by developing custom thumbnails for property videos, updating titles, creating description templates and grouping videos into the playlists.
Ali'i Resorts social channels:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aliiresorts/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aliiresorts/