Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
With its opening in 1979, Canyon Ranch introduced a generation of guests to integrative wellness at a time when yoga, meditation, plant-based diets, and many approaches that are popular today were unfamiliar concepts to most. This new word “wellness” would grow into a multi-billion dollar industry.
After three decades of expanding locations, services, and potential target audiences, the Canyon brand was in need of a focused transformation. Beginning in 2020, FINE helped the brand define its next phase—from brand vision and strategy to digital experience and a new approach to bundling services and marketing “pathways” to wellness.
To target paid media required targeted stay products that connect to goals prospective guests seek. Far beyond a typical resort hospitality experience, Canyon Ranch offered new “pathway” bundles that thoughtfully assembled services, treatments, and experiences connected to core guest wellness intentions, such as healthy weight loss, finding calm, breakthrough performance, breaking away from burnout, and more.
The goals of the paid program span quantitative business results and brand awareness and perception alike.
- Optimize to Exceptional Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Drive Clicks that Convert: CVR from qualified traffic that perceives high value in the high ticket price of an extended Canyon Ranch wellness stay
- Increase revenue and average ticket by booking “Pathways”
- Hinge messaging on Canyon Ranch’s most differentiated services and their impact on inspiring guests’ well way of life
Multiple creative executions were developed, evaluated and tested to arrive at the campaign(s) that showed the most promise on all these fronts.
Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
The “winning” creative executions that became the campaign emphasis focus on the chronology of on-property experience from check-in until departure to convey how it all leads you to feeling transformed when you leave. Imagery and short copy enable guests to envision the feeling that their goal is possible in an environment that “inspires your well way of life”.
In short, the first step is to book a “pathway” experience and arrive at Canyon Ranch. But the promise is that every departure is a new beginning.
Through paid media, we doubled down on the reach behind the message, to acquire customers through paid channels. Where past strategies relied solely on branded terms to capture people already searching for Canyon Ranch by name, the new approach allocated more spend targeting past and prospective customers on non-branded terms based on their concerns, interests, jobs, locations, and more. The full-funnel approach increased brand awareness at all stages of the purchase journey, broadening from mid-funnel to sustain new interest in the brand across other touch points.
Managing over 25 simultaneous campaigns across Google, Meta, and Linkedin, we fine-tuned a journey built upon initial interest. Successful organic social campaigns were leveraged into paid activations, and new search/social content leveraged detailed reporting to test and refine. A series of pilot campaigns helped validate new strategies and determine whether and where to integrate these tactics over the long term.
Continuous refinement honed tactics for driving high-quality site traffic to support key end goals to convert revenue and acquire customers with low CPA, high ROAS, and an especially compelling conversion rate.
Paid media helped Canyon Ranch further focus its message of transformation, and reach people with a promise beyond the general “wellness resort” that has become commonplace. Instead, it’s a message tailored to their vision of wellness.
Return on Investment: How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
The campaign generated an average of $400k a quarter for 3 business quarters. By meeting our users with specific interests with creative that was specific to them, we saw over $200k of revenue in a month and a half of the campaign being active.
The biggest drivers of ROI were substantial changes in conversion rate (CVR) and simply an uptick in the total number of bookings. The campaign yielded clicks that are 3.5x more likely to convert than any of the brand’s previous paid media campaigns.
Particularly strong campaign theme variations included Integrative Weight Loss and Breakthrough Performance, two stay intentions aimed at very different audiences and drivers but both successful.
Layered onto the themed creative, a Booking Engine Remarketing Campaign across all properties showed exceptional results. All told, the campaign variations drove a range of significant returns, including:
- ROAS Ranges: +20-121% over historical average with new creative
- Revenue: +75-143% over historical benchmarks with new creative
- Bookings: +154% YOY
- CVRs: +352% YOY
Division
Digital - Social Media Campaign