Digital Marketing Agency

Shillim Estate Retreat & Spa: India’s most scenic and
award-winning spa at Shillim gets a face-lift.

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The Background

The Shillim Retreat Estate and Spa is set in the majestic Sahyadri mountains, in the Western Ghats of India. In fact, the Sahyadri montane range controls the weather for most of Western and South India. It has been aptly declared by UNESCO as a world heritage site.

Sprawled over 350 acres of reforested mountain and valley, deep inside these pristine hills, lies Shillim, easily India’s most scenic wellness retreat. It’s an ideal getaway for busy executives and families in Mumbai and Pune which are the cities, close by.

99 cottages are spread out in this large, beautiful, nature-abounding land. Each cottage comes with its own view of nature and the mountains. Each cottage is generously canopied by the forest trees and secluded from its neighbour. Each wakes up to the sounds and sirens of tropical birds.

The enduring beauty of the Shillim Estate Retreat & Spa

Shillim is home to 9 artfully crafted wellness programmes that promise to detoxify and heal the mind, body, and spirit. These programmes combine the ancient Ayurvedic treatments of India with holistic modern approaches towards wellness.

Called the Dharana Way of Life, these wellness programmes amplify the life force through nourishment, healing, forming of healthy habits, meditation, mindfulness, and fitness which are custom prescribed for each guest based on advanced medical diagnostics.

Frequent events by celebrities and visiting masters reinforce healthy eating and healthy living.

Nature activities abound on the property - this is exactly what the fitness and active life aficionados would revel in.

Five tastefully appointed, wellness themed restaurants based on the panchabhutas, or 5 basic elements - air, water, fire, ether, and sky - serve healthy Indian, Mediterranean, and Western food.

The Shillim Estate Retreat & Spa is managed by the prestigious Hilton International and owned by Writer Realty.

The Objectives

The remit for Pigtail Pundits was to create a world-class, responsive, website that sells Shillim - its cottages, its wellness programmes, and its lifestyle.

Content Marketing involving search, social and blogs for organic ranking came next.

The Challenge

Shillim had a website prior to this. The problem with was that the it was brochureware and did not do justice to the property in terms of sell, or results.

Pigtail Pundits had to rethink and re-architect the entire website.

We sought inspiration from some of the best resorts and spas in the world. Based on this research, we combined elegant copy with beautiful imagery of Shillim to make a unique site that sells Shillim.

Since Hilton takes care of bookings, all the calls to action are directed to the Hilton website.

The copy was inspired by the PASTOR rule of Ray Edwards and set to the poetry of the environmental writers such as John Muir, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

Re-imagining the Shillim website.

50 pages of mouthwatering copy inspired by the legendary writers on environment - Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard and John Muir, were crafted and polished.

The copy was peppered with contextual images from Shillim and punctuated with CTAs directed to Hilton Shillim.

The site also sells premium, one-of-kind, luxury residences at Shillim.

The Technology

There were no major technology challenges.

The site uses ProcessWire CMS, a scalable, modern, blazingly fast system which has all the goodness of a modern CMS without any of the traditional bloat associated with WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal that we have worked with previously.

It is themed on top of Twitter Bootstrap.

A slew of premium ProcessWire plugins such as Form Builder, Profields, ProCache, and Markup SEO were used as part of the build.

The Results

In about a month of its launch, Shillim has captured 5 leads for its unique, luxury residences. That’s without any promotions whatsoever.

The Shillim events marketed by Hilton-Shillim, have got 100% room occupancy during Christmas 2017 and New Year 2018 with just a sprinkling of Facebook ads.

The Content Marketing for Shillim Estate Retreat & Spa with regular blogs, newsletter, and eBook downloads has just started. This should see the leads pick up both in number and quality.

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