Sun Peaks Resort is a year-round resort situated just outside of Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. Our client, Tourism Sun Peaks is the Destination Marketing Organization that is mandated to promote the destination to the world! It has full-service resort amenities, friendly locals, and a car-free village with shops and cafes that is surrounded by three mountains, allowing for a wide variety of festivals, outdoor events, concerts, and activities. The gorgeous natural landscape also has hiking trails and when it comes to wintertime, there are stunning slopes for amazing winter sports — it’s actually Canada’s second-largest ski area and was named one of National Geographic’s Best Winter Trips!
With a multitude of experiences for every visitor year-round, a trip to Sun Peaks feels like escaping to a completely different world. Our goal was to help increase brand awareness for Sun Peaks to potential visitors, and sell more season passes during the winter season.
Our digital ad campagins drove some great results for Tourism Sun Peaks:
Above Impressions Goal
Within two weeks, the campaign exceeded their impressions goal by 233%.
People Recalled Ad within 2 days
We crafted impactful ad campaigns with exceptional recall—18,510 people reported remembering the ads when surveyed within two days of seeing the ad
Above Revenue Goal
Sun Peaks had never sold as many pre-season passes as they did in this campaign…ever! They exceeded their campaign revenue goals by 6%!
Average time on site
13.8% of landing page visitors clicked on the “continue” button to learn more about rates and information.
The Challenge
Adjusting For The Weather
Challenge #1: Mother Nature was cruel: last year, Sun Peaks had their lowest sales season yet due to a terrible snow season.
Challenge #2: There was a price increase implemented for season passes.
Between unruly weather, ticket price increases, and having previously run campaigns strictly in-house, Sun Peaks was concerned that ticket sales would be sub-par this year.
How could we communicate the unique value and experience of a season pass for Sun Peaks with according price increases? The biggest challenge for Sun Peaks was to reinforce the true value of a season pass to the target demographic.
The Strategy
Here Comes the Sun
War Room implemented a multi-channel, programmatic strategy utilizing Kedet™, our proprietary ad platform. We integrated hyper-targeted audience segmentation across display, Facebook, and Instagram ads to reach potential buyers at various stages of the funnel. Each campaign was meticulously optimized for specific geographic locations, including Vancouver, Surrey, and Burnaby, based on regional engagement data.
With Sun Peaks managing advertising in-house, increasing demands left limited resources for campaign oversight. War Room stepped in to consolidate and expertly manage their campaigns across all ad platforms, ensuring efficiency and precision.
Leveraging our proprietary technology stack, we provided in-depth analytics and reporting. During our audit, we identified that their website wasn’t mobile-responsive—meaning traditional “click-to-website” CTAs wouldn’t drive optimal results.
To maximize season pass sales, we prioritized awareness through visually compelling ads on Facebook and Instagram, paired with advanced targeting strategies.
Having only used Display Ads for brand engagement, Sun Peaks had never run social ads before. By guiding them into new advertising territory, we took them out of their comfort zone—and delivered big-time results!
Conclusion
We’re Walking On Sunshine
Sun Peaks never sold as many pre-season passes as they did in this campaign…ever!
Moreover, they exceeded their campaign revenue goals!
We saw a lot of engagement in extended reach. We were pretty impressed, we had a target in terms of impressions that we were going to reach in the campaign and I think we tripled it! They were able to scale things up at a higher level, so that delivered more results for us from an awareness and conversion standpoint. So to see that kind of growth for us, it was the best growth that we’ve seen in the last handful of years.
One of the great things that I love about the reporting that War Room provides you as a client is that they provide the behaviours of the visitor to your site through their heat scroll maps, where their cursor is hovering over, and where the engagement is on the page they’ve taken to, which gives you great insight to future landing pages.
Jennifer Lestander
Destination Marketing Manager, Sun Peaks Resort
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