How refocused targeting can make a real difference

Challenge

For over 40 years, Gulliver’s Theme Parks & Resorts have been providing families with adventure days out and fantastic fun short breaks. With a huge selection of rides and attractions they have been successful in drawing large numbers of visitors to their Warrington, Milton Keynes & Matlock Bath sites.

However new visitor numbers were not meeting expectations. In an extremely competitive market this needed to be addressed to ensure continued business growth.

The Grove Media were appointed to work closely with and support the Gulliver’s marketing team to help achieve this key objective.

Solution

We conducted a comprehensive strategic overview of Gulliver’s historical media activity and found the repeated use of previous plans was limiting the Parks ability to attract new visitors. Working closely with the client team, we identified a number of key new audiences which weren’t being reached through the current approach and adapted our planning.

This meant broadening the media mix to focus on families, grandparents, ethnic groups, schools and interest groups such as scouts and guides.

The plan was expanded to include a wider TV channel basket, AV sponsorship, OOH, specialist press, targeted email, paid for social media and for the first time, cinema.

Results

Visitor numbers showed a double-digit uplift across all three parks. And there were plenty of fresh faces, including grandparents, and new markets such as ethnic groups.