Everyone’s heard the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s surely saved a lot of time in the decades since it was coined. But, like so many proverbs, it has its limitations, especially when applied to marketing strategy. If Williams Randall were to revise that old saying to reflect our approach to year-over-year campaign strategy, it’d go more like this: “It might not be broken, but we’re going to make it better.” It’s this proverb that we looked to when working on the 2023 season pass campaign for Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari. 

Taking What’s Worked & Making it Better 

For the last ten years, Williams Randall has had the privilege of being the agency of record for the Southern Indiana theme park. Even by our own ambitious standards, the 2023 Holiday World Season Pass campaign was a rousing success—its Key Performance Indicator (KPI) numbers beat 2022’s KPIs soundly—and that year was no slouch. A big reason? We utilized insights gained from that campaign to adjust our 2023 campaign strategy. Plus, we saw advancements in targeting and trackability for online ads, and the addition of some new social platforms/tactics.

Strategic Changes Paid Off

At Williams Randall, we don’t “set and forget” our media campaigns. We measure and track all we do so we can make necessary shifts to get even better results for our clients. We took that to heart and made some strategic changes that differentiated the 2023 campaign. Some highlights include:

• An earlier start to the campaign than in ‘22, to align with the park’s announcement of Good Gravy!, their new family-friendly roller coaster (which opened in Spring 2024). We used that momentum to bolster Season Pass sales while promoting the new attraction.
• Adding YouTube ads to the media mix, to build and bolster early- and mid-campaign awareness.
• For the first time, adding a TikTok video, which ran the third week of November when holiday spending traditionally begins to ramp up.
• Taking advantage of more robust targeting capabilities to reach out to highly specific groups in addition to the broader, more general ones we've traditionally targeted.
• Continuing to incorporate the Pre-K Pass messaging, which was proven effective by a prior campaign and highlights a recent program raising the age of free season passes from two to three.

Some of these changes represented mere tweaks from the previous year’s campaign. Others were more substantial. But collectively, they all serve as evidence of a refusal to simply repeat what had worked in the previous year’s campaign strategy. The eyebrow-raising YoY KPIs they produced attest to the value of a policy of never standing pat when contemplating a new year’s campaign strategy.

The Results

With nearly the same budget YoY, season pass sales increased by 23% year-over-year. That increase in ticket sales led to a $33 ROAS (meaning a $33 return for every $1 of media spent in market)—which was also a 51% higher ROAS than last year. Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari has a new set of brand loyalists to enjoy the park all season long.