MetroLagoons is a rapidly growing regional chain of aquatic playgrounds featuring outdoor recreational activities, cafes, concert spaces, and poolside tiki bars. They operate multiple locations across Florida, including Wesley Chapel, San Antonio, and Wimauma, and have plans for additional locations in the near future.
Since 2022, Cordelia Labs has been working with MetroLagoons to boost ticket sales by driving traffic to their website through geographically and demographically pinpointed digital and traditional advertising.
The challenge was to build awareness, especially of the new location, while maintaining ticket sales at all the other established venues.
Building Brand Awareness at Multiple Locations
The Mirada Lagoon in San Antonio, FL, opened in June, 2023. It’s their biggest lagoon yet with the greatest number of amenities. MetroLagoons needed to build brand awareness, attract new visitors, and activate existing customers. Their picture perfect blue lagoons speak for themselves, so we needed to make sure we were driving high quality traffic to their website that will ultimately convert into ticket sales.
Maximizing Ticket Sales
While it would have been easy to focus more on the new lagoon, it was imperative not to forget about the other two established locations, Southshore Bay in Wimauma and Epperson in Wesley Chapel. These locations needed to continue to attract returning and new customers.
Minimize Internal Bidding
Lastly, Epperson and the new Lagoon, Mirada, are only 5 miles apart from each other. Their proximity is an advantage for their operations, but it meant we needed to keep a close eye on our campaigns to make sure we didn’t have any internal bidding wars.
We settled on a data-driven, omnichannel media campaign that features the best of what the Lagoons have to offer. With imagery of MetroLagoons’ beautiful locations as a backdrop, we tested, retested, and continue to test different creative messages and calls to action to increase reach.
Not only did we use every digital platform — search, social, and video — we also expanded into some traditional platforms as well, such as radio and billboards.
Precision Targeting
Standard targeting would set a radius focusing on people within 30 miles of each of the Lagoons along with some select “larger cities” like Orlando. When the newest Lagoon, Mirada, launched, we needed a new footprint given its proximity to the Epperson location. So we split Tampa up: Mirada targeted the Greater Tampa Bay area, Epperson’s targeting was north and northeast, and SouthShore Bay continued targeting cities to the south and southeast. While some messages had an overarching theme, the budget was split accordingly.
Data-Driven Channels
With a year of data under our belt from our previous work with the client, Cordelia Labs used various forms of digital and traditional advertising to create the right media mix to reach and engage our target audience. From videos on YouTube and TikTok to snackable content on Instagram, we were able to optimize our campaigns to obtain a very favorable click-to-conversion metric.
For more brand awareness, we specifically partnered with iHeartRadio to produce 3 live events at the Lagoons including raffles to win prizes like a YETI cooler, free splash passes, and even free tickets. All of this was promoted across iHeartRadio’s streaming and radio channels, especially 103.5.
The result was a record-breaking summer! Our partnership with MetroLagoons produced their busiest summer on record – for the second summer in a row! — and the campaign is still paying off even during the offseason.
- 20+ million impressions served
- 918.5% 2023 season ROAS
- 96% increase in ROAS from 2022
With two summers of record-breaking ticket sales under their belts, MetroLagoons is poised to expand: they have three additional locations set to open in Parrish, Fort Myers, and Land O’Lakes in the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
