Hocking Hills Lodge 5x Booking Growth: How We Turned Seasonal Challenges into Year-Round Revenue Growth.

When Hocking Hills Lodge & Conference Center set ambitious goals, we helped them exceed every one. Our campaign drove 5x the expected bookings, achieved click-through rates 16x higher than industry benchmarks, and more than doubled revenue targets.

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The Results That Matter

Campaign Performance Highlights:

Bookings exceeded targets by 5x through conversion optimization
Click-through rates reached 16x above benchmarks across all digital channels
Revenue generation surpassed goals by 2x, delivering exceptional ROI
Email performance exceeded travel industry standards with open rates 6% above benchmarks and click rates nearly 3x industry averages
Winter campaigns drove 55% of total conversions, proving our seasonal approach

This growth wasn't luck—it was the result of precise audience targeting, creative aligned with traveler intent, and a smart, seasonal media mix.

The Challenge

Like many in the hospitality space, Hocking Hills faced fluctuating demand driven by seasonality and a crowded travel market. These conditions often lead to revenue instability. But we saw an opportunity: seasonality wasn't just a barrier—it was a behavioral shift waiting to be harnessed.

The real challenge wasn't reach, it was understanding how travel motivations shift with the seasons and building adaptive campaigns that worked with those changes, not against them.

Requirement #1

Convert high demand of summer travel into year-round bookings.

Requirement #2

Reach qualified audiences across six major metropolitan markets

Requirement #3

Overcome the "weekend getaway" perception to drive longer stays

Requirement #4

Compete against larger destinations with bigger marketing budgets

Our Approach

A strong hospitality campaign doesn't just showcase amenities—it connects with what drives travelers to book, season by season. We centered our strategy around a core insight: travel motivations, timelines, and decision-making behaviors shift significantly throughout the year. Our campaign framework was built to respond to that.

Seasonal Strategy Development

Identified how prospect behavior changes by season and built campaigns around those insights

Cross-Channel Performance Tracking

Deployed tracking that revealed the true customer journey across multiple touchpoints

Creative Optimization

Designed messaging that shifts with the season and speaks directly to what matters most to each audience

Conversion Path Optimization

Streamlined the booking journey from awareness to action, removing friction at every step

The Strategy

Understanding the Seasonal Differences

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A Smart Media Mix

Search & Discovery: We balanced intent-driven search with inspiration-based discovery, tailoring campaigns for last-minute planners and destination dreamers alike. Advanced targeting across Google's platforms ensured we reached the right audience at the right time.

Social Media & Remarketing: Social is all about storytelling and connection. We created thoughtful audience journeys, using past engagement and seasonal context to serve the most relevant content and drive deeper interest.

Programmatic Advertising: We targeted high-potential travelers before they even began searching, leveraging behavioral data to reach audiences showing signs of future travel intent.

Email Marketing: We told stories and built on past experiences for our email subscribers through tailored campaigns. These emails were designed to engage, not compete—delivering relevant, timely content that complemented other promotional efforts without overwhelming the audience.

Our Impact

With a solid strategic foundation, data-driven media campaigns, and creative that inspired travel year-round, we delivered more than just strong performance—we helped drive real revenue growth. By optimizing around bookings and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend), we made a measurable impact on our client’s bottom line. For Hocking Hills Lodge & Conference Center, this wasn’t just a campaign—it was a solution to a core business challenge and the start of a framework for sustainable, year-round success.

Through our partnership we delivered:

Strategic Insights

We understood why people make decisions differently by season and built campaigns around those insights.

Performance Tracking

We tracked the complete customer journey, which revealed that most bookings involved multiple touchpoints over several weeks. While it can be common to optimize for last-click, we optimized for the entire journey.