Daytona Lagoon
Online Sales Case Study

Background

Daytona Lagoon is a water park and family entertainment center (FEC) located in the heart of Daytona Beach with an annual attendance of over 150,000 guests. The FEC is open year-round, and the waterpark is seasonal. Because of Florida’s warm climate, the waterpark season is long and stretches from March to October. Daytona Beach is a tourism-driven market with summer being the peak season.

Framing the Challenge

Dion Marketing was challenged to increase online sales of both daily admission tickets and season passes. One of the reasons why online sales was part of our strategy is because when consumers make a purchase online before visiting the park, it leaves more opportunity for additional spending on the day that they attend the park. Consumers perceive the online ticket purchase as a separate transaction, freeing up more spending for overbuys once at the park.

Landing pages were used to direct audiences to discount codes specific to their location.

Digital ads were used to target audiences through Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

Dion Marketing conducted a zip code analysis for daily ticket sales and season pass sales.

Uncovering Insights & Building Opportunity

The first thing Dion Marketing did was an audit of the website. During the offseason, driving sales of season passes is important. We created a dedicated season pass page to give guests who are interested in purchasing a season pass more information about the value that comes with having a season pass. This gave us a dedicated landing page to drive traffic to when we promoted season passes throughout the year. It also made the season pass seem more valuable because it clearly listed all of the perks that go along with being a Daytona Lagoon Season Passholder.

Dion Marketing conducted a zip code analysis for daily ticket sales and season pass sales. It was not surprising to see that most Daytona Lagoon season passes are purchased by those living within 35 miles of the park. However, for daily ticket sales, we found many opportunities around Florida 35-100 miles away from Daytona Lagoon where ticket sales were already prevalent. This was a great indicator for us that there’s great potential for increasing daily ticket sales by expanding our target audience and budget dollars to these markets, so we developed a strategy of targeting guests with specific offers and promo codes based on proximity to the park.

Any guests within 50 miles of the park would receive targeted advertisements through Facebook, Google and YouTube promoting a savings on Waterpark admission. Those outside of 50 miles received an offer with bigger savings for waterpark admission. These ads clicked through to a dedicated landing page that can only be found by those who have seen our advertisements.

Another tactic to increase online sales was to include a promo code on every printed coupon. Printed coupons are distributed throughout the area as well as on various print ads throughout the summer and include a bar code for redeeming. In addition to the barcode, we added messaging and a promo code to transition those who are traditionally coupon clippers into online purchasers.

Tracking Success

Promo codes were created to measure the effectiveness of our digital advertising mediums used as well as to track those coming from our expanding target audiences.

Through 2019, Daytona Lagoon’s online revenue increased by 73% when compared to 2018. Daytona Lagoon’s overall revenue also increased by 15% during 2019, and the the promo codes used in our digital advertising can directly be attributed to this revenue gain. By using Google Analytics we can see that in 2019 the season pass page added by Dion Marketing was one of the top pages on the website.