Parkdean Resorts
Creative Brand campaign drove signals in the thousands to pos 1 for Lake District Holidays
The challenge
Parkdean Resorts wanted to increase rankings for their Lake District holiday search terms while also pushing a positive news story. Parkdean Resorts had previously prioritised Cornwall and Devon destinations (beach locations) and the Lake District was neglected organically. Alongside onsite SEO and content, we needed links to the Lake District holiday category, but also search demand and signals around the category/destination. Parkdean Resorts ranked bottom of page 1 historically for the term.
A mix of always on and creative PR to drive online signals
What we did
We launched a creative PR campaign that hadn't been done yet - and it was all centred around the core category of Lake District.
From our own research, we found that one of the top five reasons people travel to the Lake District is for the wildlife. At the time of coming up with this campaign idea, we spotted something in the news - British hedgehogs were in the BBC headlines for being at risk of going extinct!
Foxes and bushfires were killing off British Hedgehogs, and they were at risk of no longer being here.
So we created the world's first hedgehog holiday home, a hibernation home exclusively at Parkdean Resorts to protect hedgehogs during the winter. We partnered with the hedgehog charity Prickles & Paws, where we got a famous hedgehog actress from "King of the Road" adverts, and built a luxury holiday park for hedgehogs - featuring lodges, swings, bushes and a faux hot tub, of course.
We created a video with the hedgehog model called Flowers, filming her exploring the miniature holiday park and then presented it on a landing page on the website. Social assets were also created to help drive the message across social channels.
We even created a beautiful poem for an extra push.
To support the story, Paws & Pickles gave expert commentary on the animal’s new endangered status, as well as, providing tips on how best to look after them as they go into hibernation.
The campaign was pushed to journalists in the travel, environment, and lifestyle sectors.
The campaign that drove pos 1 rankings
The results
The campaign went viral both on social media and in the press, picking up 227 links in total and appearing on large publications such as Lonely Planet, Travel + Leisure, Mashable UK, BoredPanda, and MSN. The video assets gained 21k views on Parkdean Resorts’ YouTube channel as well as an additional 35.9k views from the same video shared on Mashable’s social media. We also discovered that the video was used in 51% of all media coverage gained.
The campaign drove a huge spike in search visibility for a URL that usually sees little traffic throughout winter, with 57 new relevant keywords and 178 improving in rankings. Parkdean Resorts are now at pos 1 for Lake District holiday terms above Sykes Cottages, Hoseasons, Haven and more. Aside from that, visibility increased from 70% to 85%, with ‘caravan holidays’ going from 7th to 5th.
Pet-friendly holiday keywords went up from an average of 21st to 2.4 in April 2021, seeing ‘dog-friendly caravans’ and ‘pet-friendly caravans’ both ranking first. The average time on the page was 4:21, showing people weren’t just visiting the site - they were staying to watch the video.
