Who is Watauga Group?
An independent media planning and buying agency comprised of dedicated planners, buyers and analysts with a specialty in performance and conversion-based targeting for travel, telecom, and food/retail.
Although our headquarters are in Orlando, 10% of our team resides in South Carolina, and tourism is the life blood of the communities we call home. Additionally, with offices also in Atlanta and Birmingham, we have a deep understanding of the key markets that drive bookings to the coast of South Carolina.
Improved Digital ROAS by 300%
Goal
Increase park visitation and drive online sales for season passes & single day tickets.
Challenges
Dollywood focused on 5-6 core drive markets for all media, with a heavy spend in TV/Radio. The high cost of a traditional broadcast approach limited expansion opportunities and digital tactics like SEM & Retargeting were restricted the same 5-6 core markets. The result – no view into market growth potential and restricted ability to improve optimize and ROAS.
Strategy
Revisited the market allocations and media mix to focus on ROAS. Step one was to develop a change, including new scoring system for market opportunity index based on sales revenue/volume not total tickets.
Tactics
- Developed a market tiering approach for all US DMAs to assess and project market expansion opportunities.
- An overhaul of the broadcast approach to deliver TV commercials in family-based content with higher recall. Reduced overall TRP levels instead of just buying TV TRPs as tonnage. This aligned messaging to reinforce and even change positioning of Dollywood to a place to reconnect with family.
- Savings from broadcast were invested in digital.
- Created custom segments – Customer Match, Look-a-Like, Loyalists vs prospecting, Purchase vs. Non Purchase, etc.
- Implemented a digital mix based on market tiering, allowing markets not touched to be targeted with digital messaging.
Results
- In the first full year, ticket sales broke records despite a flat budget
- Improved digital ROAS by more than 300% in Year 1
Bed Tax Collections Up 21%
Goal
Drive first-time visits to the website using key metrics (site sessions, new sessions, and time on site) as proxies for travel planning intent.
Strategy
Implement a data driven approach to develop custom segments (i.e. segment the family based on age of children etc). Then to talk to audiences when they are most likely to be considering travel and the types of trips they are planning (family, romance, adventure, event).
Digital-first plan
- Executed high impact media to raise awareness through addressable TV, endemic networks, video, and custom content driving site traffic
- Platform agnostic approach to traffic drivers
- Organized programmatic through one DSP to remove minimums, allow cross platform optimizations and consistency in segmentation
- Moved to social and programmatic optimized together to allow easy shifts in budget to maximize results
- Added data for evaluation of performance, including Adara Impact to measure by bookings/flights by campaign
Results
January 2020 YoY rolling site sessions up 44% and bed tax collection up;
- 5% in fiscal 2017
- 10.1% in 2018
- Oct-Jan fiscal 2020 up 21.3% YoY
Post-hurricane, our team leveraged discounted rates and negotiated added value to upwards of 25 million impressions for re-launch.
