Selling hospitality with modern marketing.
The Shore Kelowna
Your home away from home.
The Shore is a modern apartment-hotel complex located in Kelowna, BC. Operated by Appelt Properties, they’re part of an exclusive group of mixed-use residential and premier medical office buildings across the country.
The Shore came to us for Google Ads in December 2020, concerned with their account performance. After reviewing their account, we discovered the targeting was too broad, leading to high impressions but low relevance. They were spending their budget in all the wrong places, something that we quickly helped to turn around.
Reach
- Local hospitality with nationwide appeal
Services
- Copywriting
- Search Optimization
- Search Marketing
- Web Hosting
Year
- 2020 — Present
Technology
- WordPress
- Pantheon
- Google Ads
- SEM Rush
GOOGLE ADS
Whipping their ad account into shape.
Stray clicks from foreign countries and mobile games and lists of broad, irrelevant keywords were just some of what we found during our initial account review. After a much-needed cleanup, we developed a multi-tiered marketing strategy that included highly targeted ads and audiences. We worked with The Shore’s marketing team to determine where their guests were coming from and who their major competitors were.
Using keyword and competitor research, we built a content strategy that tied their Google Ads and blog content together. We analyzed user intent and search history to determine what people search for when booking a hotel and the best way to get in front of them during those searches.
Content Strategy
Laser-focused on location.
We knew we were up against some marketing giants. Platforms like Booking.com and Expedia invest heavily in showing up in search engine optimization, so our strategy had to take advantage of their main weakness—local expertise.
To improve The Shore’s search engine visibility, we honed in on a key factor of local search—Google’s Quality Score. By crafting specialized landing pages aligned with our newly created ad groups, we positioned The Shore as a go-to destination in Kelowna.
Our advertising strategy extended beyond typical hotel searches, targeting those looking for a variety of accommodations, from cabins and cottages to vacation rentals and resorts. Although The Shore doesn’t fit into every one of these categories directly, we aimed to present it as a compelling alternative.
Data-Driven Results
Because everyone loves
a before & after.
When The Shore first came to us, their cost-per-action (CPA) was almost $100. Within a few weeks, through improved targeting and creative strategies, we reduced the cost to below $25. And it has only gotten better from there with continuous efforts to fine-tune the account, including keyword adjustments, search term filtering, and ad performance reviews. Over the years, our strategies have delivered thousands of leads for The Shore, marking a significant boost in their bottom line.
Cost-Per-Action (CPA)
After $9.98
Impression Share
After 27.88%
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
After 1.66%
SITE OPTIMIZATION & SEO
From building to booking.
Hospitality in the Okanagan is a seasonal business. While our seasons are mild, and we’re lucky to have visitors all year long (thank you, Big White), search volumes look very different in the summer than in the spring.
During slower seasons, we shift our focus to organic growth and SEO, starting with a comprehensive site audit to determine areas for improvement. From there, we build an action plan targeting the lowest-hanging fruit.
Some things we’ve worked on for The Shore include:
- Improving mobile page speed and core web vitals.
- Fixing broken links and resolving chain redirects.
- Site security improvements.
- Conversion optimization and routine content updates.
- Webpage, category, and tag optimization.
- Optimizing images and image filenames.
- Reviewing NAP citations and creating industry profiles.
- Heat-mapping and advanced analytics (with HotJar)
- Schema and adding location-specific markup.
Through consistency in publishing blog content and on-page and off-page optimization, we’re seeing truly great results.
Organic Traffic
Growing Organic Traffic Effectively
For The Shore, we recognize the unique value that both organic search and online advertising bring to digital marketing strategies. To complement our advertising efforts, we crafted a tailored search engine optimization (SEO) strategy aimed at steadily increasing organic traffic. By utilizing a diverse set of SEO tools and techniques, we’re able to enhance visibility for a new website in a specialized fitness niche, attracting potential enthusiasts encountering this discipline for the first time.
Organic Traffic
Google Trends
Hospitality in a pandemic.
Understanding what’s happening in our client’s industries is a critical part of marketing success. Google Trends is a great tool for visualizing industry trends and search volumes so that we can get a better idea of external conditions. This can be helpful in illustrating wins and losses, regardless of what’s going on around us.
For an apartment hotel, one could have anticipated an increase in marketing performance in 2021, regardless of our efforts. COVID lockdowns dominated 2020, and many businesses in the hospitality industry faced great losses.
However, looking at a year-over-year comparison, we can see that search volume was often higher in 2020. With international travel being largely out of the question, many families opted to travel within Canada instead.
Using historical data and seasonal trends, we can learn from the past, adapt to the present, and plan for the future.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Holistic marketing for the real world.
More than ever, we’re having to rely on real-time metrics and adaptability in digital marketing. Gone are the days of attributing a sale or a lead to a single source; user journeys and environmental influences have become a lot more complex. It takes multiple interactions with a brand for customers to build trust, and what works today might not work tomorrow.
Our success with The Shore is the result of a strategic, persistent approach. While some wins have been quick, sustained growth has happened over time through consistent effort in multiple areas. If you’re ready to invest in your long-term growth, we’d love to connect.
