Using paid media to getaway in the staycation market

From the unspoiled sand dunes of Cornwall to the ancient forests and wild untamed heathland of the New Forest National Park, Lovat Parks offer luxury holiday home ownership, as well as glamping and caravanning holidays in some of the UK’s finest locations.

With new developments to fill for ownership, as well as a multi-million-pound holiday sales target, it was clear that a performance-led, impactful paid strategy was essential.

It’s no secret that the pandemic has presented big challenges to the domestic travel industry.

But once restrictions eased, British holidaymakers only had one thing on their mind, and that's booking a staycation - and Lovat needed to be ready for it.

The challenge? To maximise this opportunity. To get ahead of the competition — and to get the holiday and ownership market moving again.

Through analysis of the Lovat Parks website, we discovered that three-quarters of holiday enquirers take over a day to make their purchasing decision, and over half (53%) of users visiting the Lovat Parks website needed two to three interactions or touch points before booking their holiday.

During this crucial window, we knew they would likely be researching and engaging with other holiday providers, so it was essential that Lovat Parks remained highly visible with compelling, persuasive and eye-catching ads throughout this consideration period.

We also knew that the industry had “seen a lot of people who hadn't considered buying holiday homes on caravan parks thinking about it for the first time” and aimed to deliver quality traffic to the Lovat website and to capture ownership enquiry leads that were otherwise considered to be lost.

We envisioned a full funnel strategy, introducing social retargeting and programmatic advertising into the mix — including dynamic formats — across all of the client’s focus locations, integrating the existing pay-per-click advertising strategy with these new paid channels.

Through prospecting and personalised retargeting campaigns which focused on all priority holiday parks which had availability, we maximised the Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).

This involved new behavioural audiences within Facebook Ad Manager, allowing us to retarget optimally based on website visits as well as in-app interactions — such as form opens or video views.

To allow us to track and attribute conversions and maximise retargeting audience sizes, we implemented Facebook API.

Personalisation is key, of course. To facilitate this, we created a data feed for a dynamic holidays catalogue. This was based on what users had previously viewed on the Lovat Parks website.

Of course, given the changeable nature of government guidelines (as well as client promotions), this demanded an agile, collaborative and responsive approach.

This was an integrated paid media campaign that smashed expectations. In the domestic tourism industry, average search clickthrough rates stand at 4.68% — we’re thrilled to have achieved 16.82% for this strategy.

With a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of almost 500% from paid media and a jaw-dropping 347% increase in holiday revenue, our paid media strategy succeeded magnificently in capturing and converting customers who were looking for static caravan holidays in Cornwall and the New Forest directly.

Wish you were here? Our paid media experts are only just getting started — drop us a message if you’d like us to take a look at your strategy.