fbpx

Crystal Mountain Resort Hotel Summer Rates Promotion

THE SCOPE

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an early spring shutdown of nearly 60 days, causing the Crystal Mountain Resort reservations for the summer season to be way behind projections. Due to this shutdown, promotional marketing budgets have been reduced significantly due to loss of revenue. To make up for this loss, TwoSix Digital proposed a campaign with a 30-day run time on both Facebook and Instagram to encourage visitors to travel to the resort.

The campaign’s main objective was activating promotions that would inspire users to act quickly to make reservations at the resort in the Summer of 2020. The TwoSix team aimed to increase awareness that the Crystal Mountain Resort is a safe, post-pandemic summer getaway by highlighting the Crystal Clean Program. The program is an enhanced standard of health and safety protocols to ensure guest safety while adventuring the resort’s activities.

THE STRATEGY

The campaign strategy featured images of individuals practicing social distancing and families taking part in outdoor summer activities to adhere to new travel guidelines. This campaign’s primary targets were users in Michigan and nearby drive markets, while retargeting efforts were directed at any users in the U.S. that performed relevant actions during the campaign.

There were two key source data components used in this campaign. The first data source was gathered from Crystal Mountains’ and included recent social media engagement, reservation data from 2016-2019, and the  2020 reservation data just for lookalike audiences. The second source was from the resort’s tourism promotion organization, Traverse City Tourism. This data source included components captured from the Facebook Pixel from the Traverse City website and visitors who recently clicked on: Lodging Rates, Lodging Listings, and pages with Crystal Mountain related content on the site, along with the top 25% of users who accessed summer-related content pages.

The campaign was comprised of three ad flights.

  • The first flight used expansion lookalike audiences built from both the Crystal Mountain and Traverse City source data.
  • The second flight targeted direct customer audiences built from both the Crystal Mountain and Traverse City source data.
  • The third flight retargeted engaged users back on their recent actions. Actions included recent visits to the website and those who had searched for a room but did not make a reservation.

The promotion featured comprehensive website landing pages such as Book Hot Dates, Availability Calendar, Booking Search Engine, and E-Newsletter Sign-up.

 

Impressions

Total Unique Reach

Cost Per Click

Click Through Rate

New Reservations Booked

New Email Subscribers

Crystal Mountain Resort Hotel Summer Rates Promotion

THE RESULTS

The success of the overall campaign far exceeded expectations with the following results:

  • 1,269,308 total ad impressions
  • An overall reach of 387,844 consumers
  • 16,132 total link clicks, which resulted in 28,769 website page views with an average time on site of 1:40 per session
  • 27% click-through rate, which is 41% higher than the average Hospitality and Tourism related campaign in 2020, based on data from WordStream
  • A CPC of $0.43, which is 45% below the average Hospitality and Tourism related campaign in 2020, based on data from WordStream
  • 5,636 total Booking Engine Searches
  • A total of 219 new reservations, which resulted in new revenue totaling $221,226.58
  • 115 new e-newsletter subscribers

All of this campaign’s success included a net ad spend of $7,500, which was a 40% increase over the similar 2019 Summer campaign with a net ad spend of $5,000 resulted in:

  • 380% increase in reservation revenue
  • 243% increase on return on ad spend

When comparing the 30-day campaign perio to the year over year (2019 v 2020) data, website traffic was up in the following categories:

  • Unique Users – up 39%
  • New Users – up 41%
  • Returning Users – up 24%
  • Website Sessions – up 38%

All of this was accomplished while travel throughout most of the country was down roughly 50% due to COVID-19 Pandemic.