St. Lucia Holiday Apartments: Marketing Case Study

Video Marketing Case Study: St. Lucia Holidays & Apartment Rentals


http://youtu.be/pK_xout8F1Y


In a recent AXSES tourism marketing campaign we were faced with the task of helping a small apartment rental company in St. Lucia to get back its position on the Internet for searches. 

Their listing for “apartments for rent in St. Lucia”, “St. Lucia Holidays” "St. Lucia Villa Apartments" and other key phrases had simply fallen off the radar in Google search results.

Google Algorithm Changes Hurting Local Travel Business.

Google had adjusted its search systems to give more credit for onsite content. The sites that were showing up were the big Online Travel Agents (OTAs), representing all the major hotels in St. Lucia, adding huge "relevant content" for the different accommodation searches. Also tour companies, major brands and sites with massive content where ranking. Very few small hotels and lodging companies made it to page one of the search results.
A small hotel, villa complex or holiday apartment rented by owners can’t compete with OTA's for content. They can’t build hundreds of pages of this sort of content.

So what are they to do to avoid becoming irrelevant in the online market? They can’t ignore it. Most travelers search online to find options and make booking decisions. In fact, 57% of all travel reservations are made on the internet(i).

What Can be Done

The answer is that they can build quality and very specific content for their very special market. This means of course being clear about the USP and creating multimedia content in articles, blogs, videos and on the site; making sure that it is available everywhere.

This used to be very expensive, but with new tools and services the cost of media has dramatically decreased. Today a quality multimedia campaign can be affordable even to a small hotel and have a significant ROI if done right.

Our Case study is for a small apartment complex in St. Lucia. It has been seeing a slide in occupancy and has noted that St. Lucia tourism has moved to more all inclusive, beach holidays, and resort lifestyle vacations. Fewer people appear to be looking for apartments and the word apartment conjures up different images and expectations that are hard to manage.

This is the first in a series we will do as we tackle this case and find the solution.

The Property


The property has several units, a pool, gardens laden with fruit trees and tropical plants and a panoramic roof top terrace with a stunning view. It is up on a hill looking down on the Caribbean Sea, the harbour, the local cove and the shallow draft marina.

The apartments are more like townhouses or modest villas. All have a front door and some have a back terrace and garden.

It’s a good location; not on the beach which is about 2 mins away by car. One needs to have a car to take full advantage of their St. Lucia Holidays, while sating here

Objective

Regain search ranking for target keywords, increase business and build clientele.

Challenge #1

St. Lucia is big in "all Inclusive" and beach resorts. The property is a distinctive villa and townhouse style apartment complex that is not on the beach.

Not many St. Lucia tourists are searching for apartments. An apartment complex has a connotation of elevators and corridors which most St. Lucia tourists do not want.

The first obstacle is to overcome the misconceptions about apartments and to clearly communicate what the complex really is. It is not an apartment building in the traditional sense.

Solution

We decided to tackle this perception of apartment living straight on as you will see in the video.

We also defined the target client carefully and spoke directly to ideal client.

We focused on the prime location and created the tag line "A Great Place to Come Home To" which we registered for the client.

In addition to the video, we built a series of blog posts, a press release and quality flyers(ii) that were all distributed strategically on the Internet. 

See the video #1 and let us know if you think this will work. We plan several more videos to build on this theme. 

All of this is collateral for the clients website(iii) and the video which in terms of Internet Marketing creates authority and tells the story.

See the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv7xeWXmjBo

Let us know what you think. Comments are always welcome on the YouTube video.

Keep tuned as we move forward and share the hurdles and success…

The next video takes us inside the rooms, villas and apartment townhouses

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Sources:
(i) Stats from statisticbrain
(ii)  Poinsettia Apartments Flyer on Slideshare
(iii) Case Study on: http://poinsettiaapartments.com

Marketing by AXSES SocialindexEngine.com