Farrell's Vacations
Marketing and SEO
At a glance:
This project cultivated my digital marketing skills as I volunteered to assist in designing and implementing a new marketing plan for Farrell’s Vacations, an online company. Working with the owner, I gained hands-on practical knowledge and skills using the tools that I may experience in my future career in business.
During the month of January, I worked closely with the company assessing the competition, doing a SWAT analysis, creating a customer satisfaction survey, developing new webpages, making the website more mobile-friendly, updating social media pages, spicing up the eBay store, and creating an email campaign. The success of the campaign is measured through profit analysis, website visitors, quote request emails received per day, click-through rate, overall profits of the company, and other digital analytics.
Date
8 January - 9 February 2018
Full Report
Company
Farrell's Vacations
Summary
Project Goal: To gain hands-on experience planning and executing a digital marketing plan. Learning new techniques and applying the marketing research skills I learned in school to see the results they create for a company.
Campaign Goals: The Legacy Resorts marketing campaign seeks to direct customers to four resorts Farrell’s Vacations can offer at lower prices and that have higher profit margins through the following steps:
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Webpage designed for each resort
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Search Engine Optimization through keyword integration and meta reworks.
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Updating the eBay store with new products.
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Creating an Email campaign sent to all customers
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Updating Company’s social media sites to include the new resorts
Method
Participants, procedure, & metrics
Before suggesting changes, I decided to do some competitor and market research. Who are the competitors? What are the business strengths, etc.? To discover the environment of the current business, I spoke with the business owner, employees, and completed online research. I compiled findings in a SWOT analysis.
Next, it was time to talk to the customers. I wrote, recruited, and distributed a customer feedback survey to discover what customers currently throught of the company's brand. What sets Farrell's Vacations apart from the competition?
Through the survey, we learned that price is the most important factor for their current customers and that customers are very happy with their purchase and would repurchase. We were also able to learn some information about the demographics of their customers. Married Females with children were most likely to purchase and remain loyal customers. Resort reputation and proximity are also important in their purchase decision. Knowing this will help improve marketing language and campaign focus.
After gaining context and a better understanding of the customers, it was time to update the website, eBay store, email campaigns, and social media platforms. Standardizing branding, SEO updates, and a mobile-friendly website were the next priorities.
Results
Analysis & Results
Evaluation Statistics:
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Quote Requests: 201
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Visitors: 3,233
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Click-Through Rate: 6.22%
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Sales amount/visitor: $3.49
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Page Views: 5,894
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Pageviews/visitor: 1.82
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$0.03 Marketing cost/visitor
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Net Profit (loss): $7,549.79
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Profits increased by $6,365.21 compared to the 6-month average
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Profits are 15% higher than the best month in analysis (October)
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Lowered Marketing from $0.15 average PPC cost to $0.04 average PPC
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Increased Click Through Rate from 2.39% average last year to 6.22%
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SEO efforts effects are starting to be seen
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Email Campaign increased traffic to the website by over 200% during its first-week running
Outcome: I successfully created and implemented an ad campaign. This helped me explore my capabilities and develop the skills needed as I begin my journey as a business leader.
The deliverable for this project is a full digital report containing the research information, SWAT analysis, the three sets of ads created, and the summary of results. I also created a PDF PowerPoint for a quick summary of the project.