At the end of 2018, we were asked to take on the task of revamping the digital marketing program for a successful resort. We worked together to outline a plan that would improve their online performance and get the resort in front of a new audience.

First – we took all the great content from the existing website and folded it into a more user friendly website design. We also worked to make the site and booking engine 100% mobile responsive, while also making significant improvements to the on-site SEO implementation.

The Results:

  • YOY Mobile Traffic increased by 26% (surpassing desktop traffic)
  • Mobile Revenue increased by 73%
  • Overall online revenues increased by 10%

Marketing Improvements:

Search Marketing (PPC) – We rolled out a comprehensive Hospitality PPC campaign covering Google Adwords, Google Display & Remarketing, and Bing Ads.

Using the best practices we’ve put into place after years of marketing resorts online, we delivered an impressive return for Q1-Q3 in 2019. The good news for our client is that these results have improved even more in 2020, despite a global pandemic. Note that, in the results below, we were unable to track revenue from phone calls, so we estimate there’s another $250k in revenue driven by these campaigns.

Facebook advertising for the resort – We had a pretty profitable campaign in place for the client already – but it was focused primarily on retargeting, and wasn’t helping us grow into new audiences like we needed to.

We created a three phase approach to deploying new ads, focused on creative testing as well as audience testing. An important component of the updated social media program was understanding attribution clearly. We default to a 28-day click, 1 day view attribution – with a heavy focus on making sure our acquisition audiences exclude previous site visitors and anyone with an existing reservation. This ensures “new blood” is being driven by our ads.

On a mere $5,000 ad spend, we generated these results through the first 3 quarters of 2019. With an increase in ad spend budgeted going into 2020, we’ve been able to eclipse these results significantly, even during the pandemic.