Incomparable luxury ranch amidst majestic Wyoming landscapes

Design / Website / Digital Marketing

Home to Travel + Leisure’s #1 ranked U.S. resort, set amid 30,000 sprawling acres of Wyoming backcountry, Brush Creek Ranch is among the most distinctive properties of its kind.

Aptly categorized as a ‘Luxury Dude Ranch’, Brush Creek Ranch offers a bounty of adventures and experiences, from world-class horseback riding, snow sports and fishing to an onsite brewery, distillery and bakery. Guests enjoy the finest lodge-style accommodations, a first-rate spa and ‘seed-to-table’ dining – to name just a few of the reasons it’s a destination worthy of the most discerning bucket list.

But with such unique and creative offerings come marketing challenges demanding of equally unique and creative solutions. Wallop is proud to have designed a robust and successful digital marketing infrastructure for Brush Creek Ranch. Here’s how we got there.

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The Challenge

Unlike a traditional resort, Brush Creek Ranch features three separate properties on its grounds, each with unique facilities and offerings. Before approaching us, they had made the decision to treat these properties separately in their digital marketing, establishing standalone websites for their Lodge & Spa, Magee Homestead, and French Creek Sportsman’s Club as well as an overview website for the ranch as a whole.

While this decision allowed the ranch to fully articulate the unique features of each property, it diluted the brand and handcuffed the organic search performance of the three properties. The four separate brand new domains presented SEO challenges that were compounded by a lack of domain authority, decreased ranking ability and the separation of their brand’s total web traffic across four distinct websites.

Further issues presented themselves with the separation of Brush Creek Ranch’s digital marketing efforts across two different third-party providers: one for PPC ads and one for the website. A lack of collaboration between the two sides made it difficult for actionable insights to make their way from one arena to the other; in fact, it seemed the ads and website were singing from two entirely different song sheets.

Ultimately, the bottom line was suffering. The quality and volume of the property’s online leads and bookings were low and their average cost-per-lead was high. They were at a loss for how to address these problems. It was time for a new approach.

“Our work with Wallop has crossed over several different projects, but on the luxury resort that we work on, the proof is evident in the data. In the first full year of them owning our website and digital media spend (which happened to also be in the midst of a pandemic), we actually drove MORE traffic to the site, improved all of our major engagement metrics and significantly increased our most important conversion metrics. All of that together enabled us to, in a year when we weren’t even sure we were going to open the property, drive revenue that actually exceeded our pre-pandemic levels.”

N. Weirich, Director of Event Operations

The Results

It didn’t take long for us to identify that many of Brush Creek Ranch’s challenges boiled down to a lack of unification, both amongst their disparate digital marketing efforts and in the way the ranch’s three properties were being presented as three distinct entities online.

We worked to unite these marketing efforts in several ways. First, we built an overarching PPC ad campaign structure that was able to leverage data from and drive qualified traffic to each of the three properties. By removing redundancies that previously existed between the three separate ad accounts we were able to drive higher conversion volume almost immediately. We also abandoned the focus on generic ad keywords employed by the property’s previous agency and shifted to an activity-based account design leading to stronger conversion volume over time

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Increase in Website Inquiries

Our next order of business was to oversee the unification of Brush Creek Ranch’s separate property websites onto a single domain. This move had positive implications for user experience, conversion rates and SEO performance across the board, allowing a more consistent flow of organic traffic, greater visibility across search channels and a more streamlined booking process for guests.

Finally, and perhaps most beneficial to Brush Creek Ranch over the long term, Wallop brought a holistic approach to the management of their web assets. Where the property had previously been limited by an inflexible website build and lack of shared insight between teams, they are now able to work with a single team to implement new website functionality in response to UX data, track results across marketing channels and deploy their marketing spend more efficiently.

In short, what Brush Creek Ranch has in Wallop is a dedicated partner: a trusted extension of their team capable of steering the ship on all digital marketing efforts and being accountable for their bottom-line results.

Together, we helped Brush Creek Ranch have one of their best summers ever in 2020, breaking occupancy records and defying that year’s market downturn. This is just one of many milestones we aim to achieve with them over the years to come.