Client Success: Attracting Tourists to Waterfront Condos and Businesses

Placing a tourism property in a popular tourist destination sounds like a recipe for success. But when your business is competing with the attraction of white-sand beaches nearby, foot traffic from vacationers isn’t always automatic.

Add on the lack of free parking, as well as a cluster of businesses competing for the same customers, and that tourist destination can quickly find itself in urgent need of an advertising strategy to draw those tourists onto its property.

When this unique mix of business challenges threatened a waterfront development in the southeastern United States, the business realized it needed help to stir up business for its vacation condos and merchants serving local vacationers.

To develop an ad strategy that raised awareness of its offerings and increased foot traffic to its waterfront development, the property turned to Cox Media’s team of digital advertising experts.

The Goal

The top advertising goal for the waterfront development’s management team was attracting visitors to their residential and commercial properties. To incentivize this foot traffic, the business wanted to raise awareness of its more than 60 merchants operating from the development, including restaurants, retail stores, outdoor adventure businesses, family activities, and other popular tourist attractions.

In particular, the development wanted to target tourists staying at specific nearby properties, as well as affluent residential communities with plenty of discretionary income. The property also wanted to promote its vacation condo rentals to residents of affluent ZIP codes in major cities throughout the southeastern United States.

The Campaign

To build awareness and foot traffic referrals from specific local and regional communities, Cox Media developed keyword and contextual retargeting campaigns that geo-targeted ad deliveries to the clients’ target audiences. Keyword-based advertising was used to build awareness and website referrals among consumers conducting relevant online searches related to tourism and leisure.

Locally, Cox Media launched geo-targeted campaigns that promoted local events being held at the waterfront development, with a goal of increasing foot traffic and tourism dollars spent through those campaigns. Through this two-fold campaign dividing local tourists and regional would-be travelers through segmented campaigns, the client was able to use a digital ad strategy to generate new revenues both in the short-term and in the months to come.

The Results

The local event ad campaign generated significant ROI for the development, turning a $500 monthly investment into an average foot traffic increase of 400-600 visitors each month—roughly $1 per visitor. Even by conservative ROI estimates, this ad campaign delivered impressive value for the business: Assuming 40 percent of referred visitors spent an average of $100 each, the revenue generation could be upward of $16,000—a 32x or greater return on ROI .

Meanwhile, website referrals for condo bookings produced an overall 2 percent increase in user sessions, along with a seven percent increase in unique visitors and a six percent rise in page views. Based on the strength of the overall click-through rate for these campaigns, the client is now interested in developing cable TV ads geo-targeted to select communities where their initial ad campaigns have generated the strongest interest from consumers.

When local competition is fierce, a targeted advertising strategy can help your brand cut through the noise and connect with your customers. Get started today—contact us to learn more.