The situation
A beach resort sells a season. The searching happens in spring, the booking happens in early summer, and by Labor Day the year is decided. There is no fixing a slow quarter in the next one.
We started with Ballard's in 2022, and we have now been through five full summer seasons with them. What we took over was a website that was underselling the brand badly, with no tracking worth the name and analytics too thin to tell anyone what was working. For a business that lives or dies on one season, not knowing which marketing produced the summer is an expensive way to operate.
What we did
Replaced a plug and play rental system with a booking engine built for the business
The beach rentals ran on an off the shelf plugin that worked the way the plugin wanted to work. We replaced it with a custom booking engine designed around how the resort actually sells, and we have kept optimizing it every season since. This is the part most agencies would have left alone, and it is the part that takes bookings.
Put tracking in place, then used it
Analytics and conversion tracking came first, because everything after it is guessing otherwise. Five seasons of clean data is now the thing that decides where the money goes each spring.
Run every channel from one place
- Google Ads built around the searches that matter in a short season, plus paid social.
- Email and SMS marketing, which is how a seasonal business reaches people who already know it.
- Day to day social media, not just posting but running the accounts.
- Radio advertising and print in Providence Monthly and Rhode Island Monthly.
- The screens on site, carrying menus and the upcoming music lineup.
- Photography and video, including a television commercial we produced that ran locally this year.
One team across all of it means one calendar, one set of photographs, one message, and no forwarding between five vendors in the middle of July.
What happened
Website and booking traffic, measured in Google Analytics against the 2021 baseline, before we started:
- Up 33% through September 19 of 2026, at 187,733 combined users on the website and booking system, with more than three months of the year still to be counted.
- Up 39% in the first full year together, 2022, the peak year on record.
Traffic on a seasonal business is not a straight line, and it has not been one here. 2023 came in below 2022 before the following seasons climbed back.
Social, from the start of 2022 to now:
- Instagram from 6,000 followers to 18,000.
- Facebook from 18,000 followers to 37,000.
- More than 3 million views across the accounts each summer season.
What made the difference
Somebody owned the booking engine. Rebuilding the rental system instead of living with a plugin is the difference between marketing that sends people to a resort and marketing that sells the room.
Tracking came before spending. Five seasons of data means each spring starts with evidence instead of opinions about what worked last summer.
Everything is produced by the same team. The photography feeds the social, the social feeds the ads, the ads land on a site built for the booking, and the screens on the wall run the same message. Nothing gets lost between vendors, which matters most in the eight weeks when the whole year is decided.
Services used
Web design, SEO, Google Ads, social media, digital marketing, photo and video and print, for a client in hospitality.