50% of our existence as Wallop has been spent working with our good friends over at Mirror Lake Inn Resort & Spa. We began working together in 2013, so to say we’ve been through a lot together would be an understatement. However, like many of the properties we work with, they’ve been in the fortunate position of getting through the pandemic stronger than ever.
While it would seem that persuading people to book a vacation, or work at, a lakeside, mountain-view, award-winning, luxury resort and spa in the Adirondacks—who spent $500,000 on top-of-the-line cleaning technology throughout the pandemic—should be an easy sell, as anyone in this industry is savvy enough to know, there’s no such thing as an easy sell!
Wide open spaces & pure mountain air
Digital Marketing
From trying to drive more midweek bookings, to reducing reliance on OTAs and getting a return on third-party tools and platforms, Mirror Lake Inn has faced all of the challenges hotels across the world are used to facing. However, over the past few years, they’ve also been in the enviable position of being fully booked for weeks on end, and even pulling themselves off of OTAs during certain periods as direct bookings are so strong.
But challenges can come from all angles, and one particular struggle that the property faced before we began managing their website concerned the accessibility features of their website. This is a problem that properties often face and one that we were ready and willing to help them overcome.
Other goals for the property have included the desire to drive more package bookings, to get help finding more qualified talent for their hiring process and to create strategies for edging out their competition in organic search.
Deepening Their Talent Pool
2020 and 2021 have been tough years for hiring. So while hotel bookings were strong for Mirror Lake Inn, we turned our sights to helping them generate a higher volume of qualified job applicants.
We began by running ad campaigns targeting those specifically searching for jobs on Google and highlighted the benefits of working at the property to those who demonstrated interested in a new career on Facebook and Instagram.
At the same time, we closely monitored the content people were engaging with on the website. The data showed that people were most interested in finding out about the perks and benefits of the jobs, so the Mirror Lake Inn team created a new blog post on exactly that. After adding this to the website we saw a 267% increase in applications.
We continued to attract people to explore the careers pages from ad campaigns, emails and organic searches, however we often found that people were looking but not applying. To find out why, we set up tracking to monitor the drop off point on the website. This led to us reducing the length of the application. In the two weeks following this change, we saw a 78% increase in applications.
To further boost application submissions, we also added a popup message that appears when people on the application pages show signs of leaving the website, to remind them of the benefits. In the weeks following this change, we saw 17% more applications come in.
As a result of these changes, we also saw 80% more applications coming from the ad campaigns which, in turn, reduced our cost-per-acquisition.
Beating The Competition
Mirror Lake Inn is surrounded by an array of top-quality hotels and resorts both geographically and in search result pages. While we can’t change their geography, we can change their search performance. And that’s exactly what we did when the pandemic first hit. When everything closed down, we took that time to do a deep audit of where things were and we took a look at the competitors. A major finding was that they weren’t ranking for some location-specific keywords that our competitors were. This led us to develop a combined paid search and SEO strategy to increase visibility on these searches. Now, we outperform all competitors in Lake Placid on these types of searches and hold top page-one positions.
+40,918 additional impressions on the new keywords
Prioritizing Accessibility
Legal action is a headache for any hotelier, but it’s a common outcome for hotels that don’t take proactive, ongoing steps to adhere to ADA guidelines and make their websites user-friendly for guests with disabilities.
Wallop takes steps every month to check Mirror Lake Inn’s website accessibility features are maintained to the latest standards. Vigilance in the area is especially important when website content is being updated regularly, so we take the steps necessary to ensure that whenever the property updates content on their site, it fits seamlessly within the accessibility framework.
