Here’s how we sold out summer…

APPROACH

With thousands of holiday parks across the UK, it’s an incredibly busy market with very little space for new offerings. Thankfully for Meadow Bay Villages, we love a challenge! 

The first task was to create a brilliant brand that stands out in the market, and define a unique proposition that would separate Meadow Bay Villages’ offering from its many competitors. We talk about this in our Meadow Bay Villages Brand Development case study, which you can see here.

With their new brand identity and proposition defined, we had everything we needed to start marketing their parks at pace. As a full-service agency, we have a comprehensive team of in-house experts across client services, digital, design, copy, SEO and PPC, all of which were needed for this ambitious project.

• Website:
  The first priority was designing and building a new website that showcases all of Meadow Bay Villages’ parks. Having looked at what their competitors were doing, we were able to create a site that sits apart from the crowd, focusing on fun, lifestyle-led content and an intuitive user journey to keep audiences engaged. We also introduced 360° caravan tours to showcase the range of models available.

• Emails:
  We launched our email campaigns with gusto, creating imaginative and lively content to announce the parks’ new ownership and pique our audience’s interest with exclusive offers. Meadow Bay Villages had an existing audience database, but we wanted to reach as many people as possible, so we carried out PPC activity that helped grow the database by over 8000. This involved setting up targeted competitions across the Meta platform and running lead generation ads to capture email addresses.

• PPC:
  The aim of our PPC activity was to reach a very wide demographic within a three-hour drive of the respective parks. We wanted to raise awareness, inspire action through exclusive campaigns and competitions, and ultimately get our audience to sign up to our database by subscribing to marketing emails.

  The paid activity was pushed out on both Meta and Google platforms, using a wide range of campaign goal objectives to ensure the best possible outcome. With low CPCs across the accounts, we achieved some amazing results, with a cost per booking of £16 on Google and a high average ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) of between 5-7. With regular optimisations and creative reviews, we honed our campaigns to best promote last-minute bookings as we got closer to hitting our target.

• Print advertising:
  We targeted young families with advertising in The Primary Times, a free magazine dedicated to school aged children. The ad included a code for 50% off holidays, and successfully converted 266 holiday bookings. We also put ads in each park’s local newspaper, driving awareness and interest within the community, and carried out online advertising on local newspaper websites (digital ads and pre-roll videos), which delivered over 7 million impressions.

IMPACT

It was a huge success: by mid-August, Meadow Bay Villages had successfully sold out summer holidays at their Billing Aquadrome and Hayling Island holiday parks. In the six-month period between launching in March and August, they had 13,891 bookings at Billing Aquadrome alone, with over £1m in revenue. And it doesn’t stop there. We’ve sold out October half term for both parks, and have already secured a large number of bookings for 2025, with an exciting Christmas campaign soon to be launched.