The challenge

Parkdean Resorts is a leading holiday park operator in the United Kingdom, with over 66 holiday parks across England, Scotland, and Wales. They have a cult following of avid ‘Parkdeaners’ who visit Parkdean Resorts for their family holiday as an annual tradition passed on through the generations. However, there was a job to be done in order to engage a new audience to the brand and make them love UK staycations just as much.

Parkdean Resorts had made a start on TikTok by leveraging trending sounds and showcasing their iconic Starland Krew in light-hearted and funny videos. This amassed a huge following of Gen Z’s to the TikTok channel, averaging at 16 years old and below.

While they drove engagement, work needed to be done to transition this audience into adults who have autonomy over bookings to impact Parkdean Resorts bottom line. We needed to evolve the brand positioning, raise awareness and capture new attention on the TikTok platform from a multitude of different individuals.

To achieve this, our dedicated strategy and social teams had to decipher:

• How do we drive bookings for Parkdean Resorts by raising awareness across key decision makers
• How do we reposition the brand on social so the content and approach still feels authentic to their brand DNA but is more mature
• How do we make Parkdean Resorts more discoverable on TikTok and ensure they rank for UK staycation and other more generic, non branded keywords on the platform
  

When auditing what travel consumers search for when researching a holiday, we noticed that the location of accommodation and its proximity to beaches, excursions, and activities was key. Social media users are actively searching for things to do in the local areas surrounding the parks, yet competitors aren’t capitalising on this, by only focusing on their on-park products and services.

The USP of Parkdean Resorts is that the parks are situated amongst some of the UK’s most beautiful and iconic landmarks - from the Lakes to Durdle Door - this is the core messaging that needs to be communicated across all social content.

The initial strategy was to uncover:

1. How Gen X are using TikTok as a search engine for their travel research and recommendations
2. How are TikTokers engaging with the content that is currently ranking for relevant searches to Parkdean Resorts
3. How do we create unique content that answers key search terms as well as engaging a wider target audience,
4. What is the content strategy for promoting the lifestyle around the parks and the amenities that surround them
5. How do we ensure the work we does makes both short term and long term impact and how do we measure said impact

The above formed a strategic plan to increase attention across TikTok in order to capture attention and drive growth.

WHAT WE DID

Our initial audit and strategy response was broken down by the following:

• Key TikTok insights for the travel and staycation market as a whole
• Full audience insight including branded and 3rd party data utilising Rise proprietary tools
• Attention score analysis to decipher what types of content are the most engaged with our target audience to imitate and curate for Parkdean Resorts
• A deep level analysis of emerging trends and recent popular trends for early mover advantages
• A full-scape opportunity analysis deciphering the value of the opportunity, market share analysis and share of voice in the market
• Best practice recommendations including creative iterations and UGC creators to fulfil our content strategy

Upon Parkdean Resorts review of the strategy, the content creation team at Rise at Seven then:

• Undertook a two week content creation shoot with social-first content creators, a videographer and drone photographer. The team visited 6 parks across the country, from Windermere to Cornwall, to capture content that showcased the individuality of the parks and their local areas
• Curated a 6 month content calendar using in depth keyword research to dictate the types of content worth proactively producing following seasonal trends
• Curated a monthly content roll out plan including creative video content dedicated for organic and paid across TikTok, Meta, Pinterest and YouTube
• A user journey roll out, dictating content opportunities at every stage of the user funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion and retention
• TikTok SEO strategy and implementation for every piece of content produced and posted
• A cross channel approach to repurpose the best performing content across Meta ads and organic
• An automated live reporting dashboard showing the impact of our efforts across social, direct and organic

The results

The Rise at Seven team transformed Parkdean Resorts’ approach to social, shifting from reliance on engagement driven by the Starland Krew and promotional messaging to incorporating more top-of-funnel brand awareness content. This new strategy encouraged a broader audience to consider UK staycations and Parkdean Resorts as a go-to brand.

In just 90 days of working together, we reached over 98% new consumers and achieved position 1 for over 20+ key terms across TikTok, all with no media spend.

This included high-intent informational search queries such as:

• Newquay
• Things to do in Newquay
• Lizard Point
• Things to do in Lake Windermere
• Newquay beach
• UK best beach
• Cornwall holidays
• Last-minute holidays UK

The Impact

The results speak for themselves:

• 92.5% Increase in Sessions: Traffic grew from 206k to 400k.
• 94.5% Increase in Transactions: Bookings rose from 835 to 1,625.
• 152% Increase in Revenue: Revenue jumped from £225k to £580k.
  

By targeting high-buyer-intent search terms, often used by decision-makers of the group, we captured low-competition opportunities that drove significant growth.

Challenges

Despite the success, TikTok’s platform limitations posed some challenges, such as:

• Lack of direct booking options on the platform.
• Few links to the website, making attribution more complex.

Upon completion of this project, we’ll update this case study with further results and insights.