The Beach at Bude is an 18-bedroom boutique hotel in North Cornwall featuring a popular bar and restaurant with spectacular views over Bude’s Summerleaze Beach.
When we started working with the hotel in January 2016, owners Susie and Will Daniel were looking to raise awareness of the hotel, bar and restaurant both locally and nationally by making the most of social media, digital marketing, and public relations.
We have worked with the owners to deliver an ongoing integrated campaign to achieve a number of objectives:
Our strategy was to reinforce The Beach as a high-end boutique hotel, and achieve regional and national coverage to establish it as a go-to destination in Bude, Cornwall and the South West to encourage hotel bookings. We also strived to build the restaurant’s reputation as a quality dining experience within the region, which, in turn, would increase restaurant bookings.
To increase the number of visitors to the website, we needed to identify how to improve the optimisation of the website in search engines and create content that would improve this.
Our strategy to increase followers on social media was to share interesting content more regularly alongside high quality images, focusing on three key channels: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
We developed a series of press releases, targeted at well-researched regional, national and trade press, and extended press invitations for stays and reviews, specifically targeting high quality travel, food and drink titles and a selective list of journalists and bloggers, both reactively and pro-actively.
We also pitched chef Joe Simmonds’ recipes to quality food titles, establishing The Beach’s restaurant as a great dining experience in its own right. In the first year of working with The Beach, the restaurant was awarded two AA Rosettes for Culinary Excellence, which we reinforced and highlighted in pitches.
To refresh the website and provide content to share on social, we arranged for an interior photographer and a food photographer to shoot at The Beach, and added these images to the website.
We updated the copy for several pages of the website, applying the changes directly. To boost organic search performance, we created two new website posts per month, creating informative content that hotel guests, visitors to Bude, and locals could refer to. As part of this, we filmed and edited a number of cocktail recipe tutorial videos, for customers to learn how to make some of their favourite cocktails at home.
We also took over management of The Beach’s social media accounts, producing fortnightly content calendars around key themes, events, offers and local news. We shared blog content and deals, and also encouraged followers to sign up to The Beach’s mailing list to receive the latest news and offers available.
Pieces of coverage
Increase in web traffic
Increase in Facebook page likes
(April 2016 – November 2017)
Social media channels have seen strong growth in both audience numbers and engagement across all platforms, with Instagram in particular performing very strongly.
PR activity resulted in 59 pieces of coverage, with highlights including listings in The Sunday Times ‘Top 100 British Hotels’, The Daily Mail ‘Best tables in Britain’, The Independent ‘Cool place of the day’, and a 9/10 review in The Telegraph.
Website traffic continues to grow annually at 10% to 35% across a range of metrics.
Our work with The Beach at Bude won a Silver award at the 2018 CIPR PRide Awards in the Travel, Leisure or Tourism category.