“As an ungated property, it’s hard to know our guests or where they come from. Signing up for Placer has given such rich customer data that our marketing efforts have done a complete 360, generating the best sales we’ve ever seen.”

-- Alex Taylor, Marketing and Brand Manager, Jenkinson’s Boardwalk

‍The Challenge

Jenkinson’s Boardwalk Looks to maximize local awareness for Its annual easter sale

Jenkinson's Boardwalk is a popular destination for nearly 2 million visitors every summer. Featuring almost a mile of beach, it has a variety of attractions including amusement rides, arcades, mini golf, shopping, an aquarium, sweet shops, dining, and a night club. While the boardwalk experiences steady traffic from Memorial to Labor Day, it is an open property, making it difficult to track attendance beyond a simple "eyeball test" or tracking individual, ticketed attractions.

That started with its annual digital and on-site Easter sale - a chance to engage the community and pre-sell tickets for the summer. With the same marketing budget as the year prior, the team wondered: how could they increase Easter sale awareness and maximize summer ticket sales?

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‍The Solution‍

Using zip codes and traffic pins to target digital ads and identify the best billboards

Alex Taylor, Marketing Manager at Jenkinson’s Boardwalk, knew that the best way to maximize ad spend and results was with data. Before any marketing, though, the Jenkinson’s team needed to know how to reach their customers, both at home and in their day to day lives outside their homes. Enter Placer.

Using Placer’s true trade area, Alex examined how guests’ home zip codes changed year over year and saw an overall decrease - with visitation in select zip codes decreasing 5-10% or more - that told him where they needed to focus their tv, radio, and social media ads to recapture visitation.

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Placer also helped with optimizing another key component of local, out of home (OOH) advertising: billboards. To do this, Alex plotted traffic pins for 28 potential billboards, searching first for ones with the highest vehicle traffic. Then, to learn whether the impressions from these billboards matched Jenkinson’s target audience, they used the Favorite Places report to see if the billboard captured an audience that included Jenkinson’s as a Top 5 Favorite Place. If so, they bought ads for the billboard, selecting and running ads on the 8 billboards had this ideal audience fit.

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The Outcome

SUCCESS: 13% growth in YoY Pre-Season sales and a new Easter sale record

The digital and OOH billboard ads were a resounding success, with 2023 Easter sales beating previous sales records by 13%. Post-campaign visitation at Jenkinson’s Boardwalk increased sharply, experiencing as much as a 250% baseline change in May, with a continuous upwards trend overall.

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With the Easter sale as just the start, Alex is excited to continue amplifying marketing impact through Placer’s robust customer data.