Basecamp Resorts: Fastest growing hospitality brand in Canada

“Working with House of Growth, we’ve seen great success in our digital marketing campaigns, posting consistent month-over-month and year-over-year growth. The team is incredibly knowledgeable and at the forefront of marketing tech and trends and has proven to be a valued asset and an integral part of the Basecamp marketing team.”

-Geoff McLean, CMO @Basecamp Resorts

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Overview

At the beginning of 2022, Basecamp Resorts entered a phase of rapid growth where the desire and need for a more developed marketing strategy became more pressing. Through our tailored Fractional Growth Marketing, ad management, and SEO services, we enriched their analytics capabilities, optimized their search engine marketing, their PPC marketing, and helped foster cross-department collaboration which enhanced cohesion and property performance. As a result, Basecamp saw a notable increase in direct bookings, organic traffic, and a significant boost in profitable advertising campaigns, marking a pathway for sustained, profitable growth.

At a Glance

Beginning State

• Lean marketing team with limited bandwidth
• Limited marketing analytics
• Low monthly ad spend

Desired State

• More direct bookings
• Further enriched marketing analytics that help make future decisions
• A part-time collaborative marketing partner/increased bandwidth
• Increased revenue
• Develop more matured marketing strategy that identifies and optimizes various growth opportunities

Services Deployed

1. Fractional Growth Marketing

1. Set up analytics & continuously optimize attribution tracking
2. Assisted in development of email marketing strategy
3. Collaborated with CMO to develop marketing budget allocation
4. Helped foster deeper collaboration
5. Assisted in development of project management system

1. SEO

1. Built backlinks for the Canada & US markets
2. Optimized website copy for target keywords
3. Wrote SEO optimized blog articles

1. Digital Advertising

1. Audited the existing ad accounts setups
2. Optimized the setup and tracking of ad accounts
3. Managed ad campaigns on Google, Facebook/IG, Expedia, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor
4. Developed seasonally unique advertising campaigns for each property that are optimized for conversions (bookings)
5. Collaborated with internal creative team to develop visual assets for the ad campaigns
6. Wrote multiple copy variations per advertising platform for each property, each season.
7. Monitored campaign performance weekly and working to further optimize the results
8. Reported monthly on ad performance & developing adjusted ad strategy & budget allocation for the following month

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Detailed Breakdown

The Challenge:

• Limited budget to hire employees or contractors to do the work
• Limited bandwidth to do all the things that needed to be done
• Limited experience with the data side of digital marketing
• No historical performance data to backup the requested budget/resource needs

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Our Approach:

1. Started with an audit of their systems, historical campaign performance data, competitor analysis, and opportunity analysis.
2. Built a multi-month marketing plan that balanced potential impact, cost to implement, and time to implement in order to develop a strategic approach that developed a strong foundation and provided quick wins in order to justify increased budgets a few months in.
3. Spent several weeks optimizing their conversion tracking and Google Analytics.
4. Launched test performance ad campaigns to validate their profitability and scalability.
5. Developed a steady SEO strategy that was within their budget but made a big impact in their organic traffic.
6. Cleaned up and improved their email marketing to more consistently engage with their past guests.
7. Developed a digital ad strategy that would allow them to dramatically increase their monthly ad spend while maintaining profitability.
8. Continuously collaborated with their internal marketing and revenue team to work on further improvements.

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The Results:

• 24.52% increase in direct booking revenue YoY (Sep 2022 to Sep 2023)
• 96.2% increase in organic traffic YoY (Sep 2022 to Sep 2023)
• Profitably increased their ad spend by 30x within a year
• Facebook Ad campaigns averaged 9.48x ROAS between Oct 2022 - Oct 2023
• Google Ad performance improved from 4.29x ROAS to 17.6x ROAS YoY (Sep 2022 to Sep 2023)
• Google Ad revenue increased 552% YoY (Sep 2022 to Sep 2023)
• Expedia Ad revenue increased 84% YoY (Sep 2022 to Sep 2023) while maintaining the same 44x ROAS.

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