Building Awareness and Website Optimization

About Golf Kamloops

Golf Kamloops is a marketing consortium consisting of 8 golf courses, 9 accommodation partners, 3 wineries and 1 transportation partner. The program is managed by the team at Tourism Kamloops. Their goal is to promote traveling to Kamloops as a Golfing Destination. With award-winning golf courses in a diverse landscape from shoreline to cliffside with 1,200m of elevation change that inspires some of the most unique golf layouts in Canada. Their mission is to “make Kamloops your primary destination for an unforgettable golf vacation.”

Client Challenge

Golf Kamloops needed support in raising awareness and the profile of Kamloops as a golfing destination. Further, Golf Kamloops wanted to generate website bookings with carefully crafted packages during a global pandemic.

Overall, the challenges were both to raise awareness to a specific audience of avid golfers that may not be aware of Kamloops’ endless and varied golfing possibilities but also to generate hard conversions and bookings to drive revenue.

Our Digital Marketing Strategy

In order to address Golf Kamloops’ challenges, our digital marketing strategy included:

Website Overhaul

In order to generate bookings through the site, we improved the user experience and site speed. Further, we enhanced the quality of the golf courses with better imagery and an overall slicker look and feel. The new site is now a lot faster and easier to navigate for users.

Action Focused

We launched a series of season-related search campaigns to promote packages with adgroups composed of relevant keywords and ad copy for a specific season and audience in order to generate bookings.

Raise Awareness

We used display and video campaigns to reach a maximum number of relevant audience members with cost-effective advertising strategies.

Results

+390%

increase in conversion rate

-63%

decrease in homepage loading time

+254%

increase in total conversions

These stats compare the Covid-19 pandemic period of 2020/2021 to 2018/2019. The results are very strong on their own but even more impressive considering the Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions during this period of time.

User Experience

The new website allowed Golf Kamloops to easily edit content, images, and videos while providing users with a better experience. The homepage loading time went from 4.6 seconds to 1.7 seconds and the conversion rate on the booking request form increased by a whopping 390%.

Search Ads Conversions

By launching frequent seasonal search campaigns, we were able to keep the relevancy high. It resulted in a decrease in the cost per conversion by 23% and the total number of conversions increased by 236%.

Display Results

Similar to the search campaigns, display campaigns were rotated often, hyper-relevant and helped deliver focused messages to a targeted audience in order to get the most value possible. As a result, the cost per conversion decreased by 83% and the conversion rate increased by 37%.

Testimonial

The past 4 years have shown significant growth for Golf Kamloops. Even with all the impacts of COVID, booking numbers and engagement have maintained a steady increase on all fronts. After adopting the management of the golf marketing consortium in 2017, we knew we needed a complete overhaul. 1UP digital had the strategies and knowledge to support an incredible website rebuild as well as a streamlined google marketing strategy that delivered great results.

Lisa White, Industry Relations + Communications Strategist, Golf Kamloops