Tourism Digital Adoption Program

The Lighthouse Motel & Cottages x Half Twelve

Based just outside Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, the Lighthouse Motel & Cottages is an old roadside motel that has been lovingly updated to offer boutique accommodation with a nostalgic feel. They approached Half Twelve Design to help with the SEO for their website and management of their Google Ads but primarily to manage their social media channels.

We began the project with an audit of their site, their Google/Facebook/Instagram analytics and a review of previous social media content. Analysis gave us an idea of their target audience (primarily female in the 35-60 age bracket) and the content that had performed well up to now. Google Ads were refreshed with new keywords as was the website copy to help raise their profile on search engine result pages. Next, we concentrated on their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

A quick polish of their brand.

With their brand identity only having been established three years previously, LMC were content with their look and feel. The only thing we recommended was a redrawing of their logo in vector form which allowed us to bring flexibility to the brand. Now we could extract elements of the logo to create things like the social media avatar featuring the oars icon or patterned backgrounds. The avatar allowed us to maintain brand recognition in situations where the full logo would have been illegible (like at the side of a comment underneath a post).

A spring-clean for their two platforms.

We refreshed the FB and IG profiles with their new avatar, an updated bio and a Linktree link that allowed LMC to highlight numerous features rather than just be a link to their website. The link brought users to a page that let them decide whether to view the page on the website that featured the rooms, read reviews or just go straight to the booking site. The flexibility of the Linktree page meant that we could add or remove content as needed.

We also put LMC’s main assets - the rooms themselves - front and centre. Pinned to the top of the Instagram profile were Stories featuring each of the 15 rooms on the property and at the top of the Facebook page, users were invited to visit the photo album section where each room had been collected into an album for easy viewing.

Creating new content.

Initial analysis of the FB/IG stats gave us some insight into what topics resulted in increased engagement (i.e. likes, shares and comments) and we used that as a starting point for creating content. LMC and Half Twelve shared a mutual collaborator (photographer) who provided us with a large bank of imagery and videos to start off with.

LMC were also encouraged to document life at the property on a daily basis and share it at regular intervals with Half Twelve allowing us to add to our archive. This abundance of content helped us with ideas for posts. At regular intervals, we would review the engagement stats to see what new topics were garnering interest and also see what wasn’t working. For example, we found that the text-heavy review posts we featured every Wednesday for the first month (see below, third from left) were barely looked at so we switched them out for more image-heavy content.

We also found we were having great success with video so we used the content to create Reels that lived on the main feeds or could be converted to Stories.

As well as creating and posting new content, we had regular ‘follow blitzes’ where we made a concerted effort to follow social media users that we felt were the right demographic for LMC or who we thought would help spread the word. Targeted hashtags with each post also helped raise awareness.

After initially being planned as a three month long project, LMC retained Half Twelve to continue managing its social media platforms. Please feel free to reach out to Marc at the Lighthouse Motel & Cottages if you’d to hear nice things about working with Half Twelve!