Stealing Power Back from Airbnb & VRBO

Bennington Properties

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Marketing Management: Copywriting, Web Design, Paid Media

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Bennington Properties // Marketing Management: Copywriting, Web Design, Paid Media //

TLDR: Kasen’s marketing management and copywriting, web design, and AdWords strategies helped a vacation rental company:

• Transform its brand messaging and UX

• Decrease bounce rate 25% within 90 days of launch

• Optimize & attribute Google Search campaigns to 15% total revenue

• Reclaim 15% of direct bookings from AirBNB & VRBO in 14 months

At WireBuzz, Kasen has been serving Bennington Properties as his client for over a year.

About Bennington Properties:

Bennington is a vacation rental and property management company in Sunriver, Oregon. For 30 years, they’ve been helping families turn their dream of owning a Sunriver vacation home into a reality. From offsetting expenses, to finding tenants and caring for the property, they guide homeowners from sale to service.

The Situation:

The employee who had been leading the project just left WireBuzz, and had not written an engaging enough script or provided quality wireframes to the web developer. The design the web developer had come up with was not up to par with competitor websites. There were T-minus 3 weeks before the WireBuzz video crew was flying to Sunriver to film, and roughly 90 days until the website needed to launch.

The Solution:

As WireBuzz’s new lead creative strategist, Kasen entered the project and quickly revised the video scripts. Within a week they were approved, and WireBuzz was confidently able to move forward with video production.

Kasen also took reins over the website and let the web developer know he would need to pivot from Elixir/Phoenix to facilitate an integration with WordPress; in order to use a hospitality-centric theme to achieve the desired visual aesthetic by Bennington’s launch deadline.

The Results:

The new Bennington Properties website launched early February 2021. Over the following 3 months, there was a significant improvement in website engagement due to decreasing the bounce rate by 25% and increasing time spent on site exploring individual property pages.

• November 2020 - February 2021 > February 2021 - May 2021:

  • New Users: 36,449 > 38,562

  • Bounce Rate: 50.29% > 37.70%

  • Pages / Sessions: 3.75 > 6.68

Throughout 2021, Kasen guided Bennington’s marketing strategy and conversion rate optimization. By December 2021, he more than doubled their conversion rate and number of direct website bookings:

• February 2021 - August 2021 > September 2021 - March 2022:

  • Conversion Rate: 0.45% > 1.08%

  • Reservations: 540 > 1,204

  • Direct Revenue: $1,363,604 > $2,827,520

In January 2022, Kasen took over Bennington’s AdWords search marketing, after advising them they should begin reprioritizing search as a direct booking channel. Within 90 days, his search campaign optimization strategies increased both assisted and direct conversions tenfold: