West Beach Parks is a world-class holiday, sport and adventure precinct covering 135 hectares of beachfront land in the western suburbs of Adelaide, just 15 minutes from the CBD.
Following several years of dramatic revenue decline, we were engaged to revisit West Beach Parks’ digital strategy and to redevelop its flagship website.
There were several factors contributing to the website’s poor performance, including confusing user journeys and the increasing impact of aggregator websites.
All accommodation businesses have a love–hate relationship with booking aggregators like booking.com, Expedia and countless others. These aggregators drive significant revenue for accommodation business, but with commissions of up to 20% it comes at a high cost.
This particularly becomes an issue when aggregators bid on accommodation providers’ own keywords (such as “West Beach Parks”), effectively injecting themselves into what otherwise would have been a direct sale and charging a commission in the process.
An obvious approach to combat this would be for accommodation providers to undercut the price points offered to aggregators, however most contracts enforce strict price parity agreements preventing exactly this.
As accommodation providers are allowed to provide discounts to members, we mitigated this challenge by developing and launching the “Beach Club”, a free membership program that’s promoted on the website’s homepage, takes visitors seconds to join and provides an instant 10% discount promotion.
The website was designed to reflect the vibrancy and excitement of West Beach Parks, and features an illustrative, interactive map and includes hashtag-based social media content from those visiting the precinct.
In addition, we completely redesigned and redeveloped West Beach Parks’ website, including the development of a deep integration with the organisation’s third-party booking provider to remove purchase barriers by keeping visitors on the West Beach Parks website for longer.
The website was developed in line with digital best practices, including the Australian Government’s mandated accessibility requirements, and is optimised for mobile devices used by a majority of the website’s audience.
We continue to work with West Beach Parks to manage its ongoing digital marketing and the website’s performance optimisation, with a focus on revenue generation from organic visitors and proactive digital marketing. In addition to West Beach Parks’ always-on activity, we’ve delivered a number of tactical campaigns, including for March Madness and to coincide with product launches and promotions at the precinct.
Following our engagement, the development and implementation of a refreshed digital strategy, the redevelopment of the precinct’s website and an overhaul of its digital marketing activities proved immediately successful, quickly reversing West Beach Parks’ year-on-year revenue declines and delivering revenue growth to the organisation.
