Marina Developments Limited (MDL) – Paid Social & PPC

Marina Developments Limited (MDL) owns and operates 18 marinas across the UK, one marina in France and one in Spain. Customer service and experience are at the heart of everything that MDL do with a focus on Warm and Friendly staff, Safe and Secure Marinas, Prompt and Efficient service and Clean and Tidy Marinas.

The Brief

MDL’s annual marina berths were coming into their renewal’s period and they wanted to ensure that they would have increased occupancy for the coming season. Our brief was to create a digital advertising campaign to promote availability of marina berths at a selection of their UK marinas and to encourage boat owners to request a quote via the MDL website.

Our Approach

A two-channel approach was chosen to reach MDL’s target audience; a Facebook advertising campaign supported by PPC Google Search ads. The large proportion of MDL’s clientele are aged between 50 and 65 and of this age group 72% of those online are Facebook users. This coupled with the targeting capabilities of Facebook, both demographic and geographic, made it an ideal platform to reach boat owners in the areas where MDL have their marinas.

We also implemented a Facebook pixel so that we could further target lookalike audiences based on the activity on MDL’s Facebook page and website.

Using refined keyword lists, affinity and in market groups and detailed demographic targeting the Google PPC ads offered us an additional way to reach this very specific audience when they were most receptive.

The creatives for this campaign needed to convey MDL’s core values as well as encourage action. For the Facebook adverts we created a series of carousel ads with vibrant images from the different marinas with current customers enjoying the breath of facilities and services offered which added authenticity to the campaign. A CTA was included on each carousel card so that the next step to take was very clear to the target audience and to drive people through to the website.

Results

The campaign was extremely successful reaching over 100K targeted individuals and increasing visits to the quotes page by 835% year on year. We are already in discussion with MDL about their next digital campaign.

"We’ve been working with MAA for almost a year now and we’ve been delighted with their approach and the great results that they’ve achieved for us across various digital marketing campaigns. The digital expertise MAA brings, together with a thorough understanding of our business and market, makes them a valuable extension of our marketing team."
Adrien Burnand, Head of Marketing