Blackpool Has It All had seen promising results overall, but wanted to improve and grow the digital marketing year on year. The objectives were to improve targeted ad deployment and website traffic. The key commercial goal was to grow purchases of the Blackpool Resort Pass, as this allows 7-day access to the resorts top attractions and therefore encourages longer stay visits.
The digital campaign was focused on two key target audiences of families with school-aged children and young couples across the UK.

The content was wide-ranging, with all of Blackpool’s events, attractions and selling points available for use in ads. As part of a wider campaign, the digital activity had to align to the core messages and creative.

We were tasked to plan, execute and optimise a digital solution, taking a multi-channel and targeted digital approach.

In order to deliver to the objectives we devised a complex campaign plan that was focused on three key areas.

The first was on timings to maximise spend in key periods, the second was around targeting to ensure we used channels where we could effectively deploy ads to target core audiences, and finally personalisation ensured we delivered compelling ads to relevant audiences. 

To inform timings, we analysed data from the website and other sources to get a lay down of when users were considering a visit and when they were most likely to book. We also undertook a research piece to analyse the time gap between booking the visit to visiting the resort, with consideration of seasonality and school holidays. This helped us understand when best to deploy ads for awareness and after what period a booking focused message is better used. The outcome was a dual phase plan that related to specific audiences throughout the campaign period. 

At this stage we were able to define the best channels to balance awareness and direct response requirements. We took an agnostic approach to channel selection, choosing platforms based on historical performance and digital insight. The result was a channel mix that included Google Search, Facebook Ads, YouTube and Display. 

The final step was to create a flexible ad plan that combined best practise on digital, with alignment to the wider campaign creative and incorporated a balanced mix of attractions and events messages. Through structured ad testing we were able to refine and improve ad performance on an ongoing basis, taking a personalised approach to copy and creative for the core audiences and their locations. 

Throughout the campaign we were proactive and data-led to continually optimise campaigns to meet the objectives. We also performed deeper campaign reviews at routine intervals, including at the end of each year, to sense check strategy from our results and use insight from the wider campaign team when it was available. 

We are pleased to report growth from digital activity for both years we have worked on the campaign. In 2018, there was a 93% increase in website sessions from paid media and 60% increase in online Resort Pass sales. Our 2019 digital campaign continued the year on year growth, delivering 60% more sessions with less media budget deployed and 20% more online sales year on year. 

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In response to the brief we developed a strategy that focused on six key themes;

1. Understanding the target customer, their socio demographic profile and booking behaviour
2. Understanding the target customer, their socio demographic profile and booking behaviour
3. Implementing a comprehensive tracking and reporting capability so that all campaigns and associated user interactions and could be tracked, measured and analysed
4. The use of additional data sources (eg weather data, Mosaic profile data) to further increase performance
5. Extensive optimisation and creative adjustments based on results
6. Being prepared, ready and willing to react to changing attraction trading patterns

It’s hard to measure the amount of treasured family days out, interactions with exhibits or children’s smiles with this type of digital activity.

But what can be measured is impressive. With such a high impact and tailored creative strategy across the 100+ customer segments, it was not surprising that the creative resonated with the target audience.

There were over 185,000 advert engagements by the audience leading to an impressive 15.4% of the audience engaging with the adverts for the most successful creative treatments.

The combined post click and post impression ROI was 8.2 and the ROI topped over 30 for the best performing trading period.

These results would look good in a direct channel such as PPC, but the fact that this performance was delivered using a paid social advertising channel shows that with good planning and execution that exceptional direct response performance can be achieved as well as raising awareness and driving engagement.

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