Managed by IMIC Hotels

Hotel’s Challenge

Inn at USC is a historic, full service boutique hotel located on the campus of the University of South Carolina. With 117 rooms, combined with extensive meeting space, this hotel needed to market itself for both leisure and business travelers. The hotel had a website that was several years old that needed to be refreshed and search engine optimized.

Existing Website Evaluation  

The hotel’s existing website was not optimized to meet the hotel’s target positioning and the customer’s needs. Additionally, the hotel felt they were missing a great opportunity to market themselves to travelers coming to the area that were not necessarily coming to conduct business or attending an event at the University. 
                                                              

Milestone Strategy

Milestone worked very closely with the customer to identify key markets and area attractions that should be promoted and redesigned the hotel’s entire website. Through relevant and search engine friendly content, hotel was promoted for several factors and keywords, such as ‘meeting hotel in South Carolina’, ‘South Carolina Boutique hotels’, ‘South Carolina weekend getaways’, ‘State Fairgrounds’  ‘things to do in South Carolina’, etc. The website was redesigned, written and optimized while keeping in mind usability, relevancy, and target clientele for the property.

Results

• Inn at USC generated almost $200K in internet revenue from June through October 07.
• Hotel generated $32K in direct revenue from the website the first month it went live (June 07).
• Additional $90K in revenue was generated from phone reservations
• Website is ranking #1-3 in organic search for most search engines for its target segments.
• Website traffic to the site is an average of 200+ unique visitors per day or 6000+ visits per month. This is the highest it has ever been.
• Hotel made its initial return on investment within the first month.