Case Study: Inn Of The Mountain Gods Targeted Search Campaign

Situation & Objective

The Inn Of The Mountain Gods is a luxury casino resort located in New Mexico and owned by the Mescalero Apache Tribe. The resort is a premier location of gaming, golf, outdoor adventure, and skiing. The Tribe needed to improve the ability to drive qualified traffic from a driving radius around the property and requested a search marketing and content campaign to drive qualified visitors and maximize revenue from the search efforts.

The marketing objective for our targeted search campaign was to increase the online revenue generated through the property website via a combination of targeted paid search as well as an organic search optimization campaign. The key performance indicators used to judge campaign success included:

• Increase overall PPC campaign revenue, measured via ROAS
• Increase natural search traffic via geo-specific terms. Measured as both overall inbound traffic as well as revenue.
• Improve the site conversion rate through qualified traffic and optimizing the on-site conversion funnel.

Target Audience

The primary target is gamers (table and machine) in key drive markets from the resort. Due to the unique geographic location of Inn Of The Mountain Gods the location of key prospects centered around metros within approximately 300 miles of the property.

In addition to the primary target of casino gamers, the effort was also placed on driving visitors to other property amenities including skiing, hunting, hiking, and outdoor adventure, as well as general vacationers.

Research & Planning

The research was based on current guest history and matching geographic targets to areas with the highest past guests concentrations.

Planning included extensive keyword research to identify the most effective terms and content opportunities.

• Radius around the property to encompass the key feeder markets for broad terms (to of the funnel).
• Identified terms with opportunity for rapid search position improvement and created a plan to improve search position.
• Phase 1 focused on hyper-local, consisting of immediate vicinity and the surrounding Ruidoso area.
• Phase 2 expanded the geographic targets to the broader New Mexico related terms.
• Maximized on-site revenue through a series of UI optimizations and content changes. A/B testing was used to gauge improvement.

Message & Implementation

The primary messaging was structured differently between the PPC portion of the campaign and the organic/content campaign:

PPC Campaign:

• The primary message in the paid search campaign was a book direct message, tailored to the search term.
• From a differentiator perspective, the property (via the website or phone/call) is the only place to be able to book direct.

SEO/Content:

• The primary messaging focused on expanding the breadth of content related to things to do on property as well as in the immediate vicinity. The focus encompassed identifying the key search terms that had significant growth opportunity.
• The marketplace differentiator was that the property offered a unique blend of entertainment on-property that could not be found anywhere else in the geographic target market.

Results

Immediately after launching the campaign notable improvements were seen across the board from the paid search, natural search, and optimization recommendations.