Crystal Mountain Resort 2023-24 Ski Season Campaign
Client: Crystal Mountain Resort
THE SCOPE
The family-owned four-season resort is located near Traverse City, Michigan, and features some of the finest accommodations that northern Michigan has to offer, along with 36 holes of championship golf, 58 downhill slopes, 25 kilometers of cross-country trails, the award-winning Crystal Spa, and Michigan Legacy Art Park.
The organization needed help with the return on ad spend for their digital advertising programs. Their goal was to increase the return on ad spending by 30%, and we were hired in November of 2023 to kick off the 2023-24 ski season.
STRATEGY & IMPLEMENTATION
Before launching the campaign, we evaluated the current program developed by their previous agency, reviewed resort booking trends and past customer profile data.
Based on the lack of investment in the Meta Platform by their previous agency, we decided to lead the overall budget spent within the Meta application. The social network buys were supplemented with a strategic approach to programmatic and native content to expose the product to a new audience, along with developing a well-structured search engine marketing program on the Google Network.
The strategy included using “known data” from the resort’s winter reservations from the past two seasons. We used that data to develop a series of “lookalike” audiences based on skiing, snowboarding, and general winter travelers.
Additional strategies included retargeting audiences built from clickthrough data collected from their email marketing program and abandoning cart audiences. The programmatic ads featured new audiences built from access to Adara and Epsilon travel audiences who have previously taken a ski trip or fit past resort guests’ geographic and demographic profiles.
For the creative, we leveraged images and video content supplied by the resort for the Meta and native content ads and developed a series of motion-based HTML-5 ads.
Return on Ad Spend
Percent Increased Revenue
Percent Better than Average Click-Through Rate
Percent Better Cost Per Click
THE RESULTS
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110% return on ad spend produced by the campaign from November 1, 2023, through February 18, 2024, going from 18-1 to 39-1!
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+61% revenue with an overall spend that was 23% less than last season due to some budget restraints driven by the lack of snow and winter weather conditions in the region.
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+723% better click-through rate than the industry average of 1.35% thanks to enhanced HTML-5 display ads.
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+1,410% better cost per click than the industry average at .26 per click.