Lost Valley Ranch is a family-owned, working dude ranch located two hours southwest of Denver. Guests come and stay for a week, with no phone service and no TVs, but with plenty of horseback riding, hiking, campfires, and the breathtaking scenery of Colorado.
With limited resources available for marketing, this client looked to Acropolis for efficient and effective ways to build their online presence, and of course to deliver valuable ROI. Our first initiative was a redesign and rebuild of Lost Valley Ranch’s website. This new site was a radical departure from the first, template style site and consequently became a mini-branding exercise by default.
Lost Valley Ranch appeals to families and couples. It’s truly a place where they can connect with each other and with nature, recharge their batteries, and renew their
relationships.
In order to build business for Lost Valley Ranch, Acropolis put Lost Valley Ranch through its strategic branding process. During this effort, we took a look at what loyalists loved about the property. We learned Lost Valley Ranch appealed to those travelers who were looking for an authentic, natural escape with none of the distractions of every day life. Lost Valley Ranch is truly a place where guests can connect with each other while they connect with nature, recharge their batteries and renew their relationships. We also recognized an opportunity to elevate Lost Valley Ranch among its competition by making it look and feel more contemporary. We used both to design and deliver websites that would put Lost Valley Ranch at the top of its customers’ consideration sets.
Retaining that Western feel through colors and graphics, we delivered a revitalized website with updated fonts, a modern design style, Flash effects, photo galleries, new navigation, architecture, and content. This alone elevated Lost Valley Ranch in the dude ranch category. To build on the success of the new site, we also fulfilled initial SEO content and instituted a pay-per-click campaign, working again with modest resources but planning for maximum return on investment.
With social media and marketing emerging as strong consumer platforms, Acropolis approached Lost Valley Ranch ownership and suggested they also enter that arena. Our idea for them was the development and implementation of a separate social networking website to serve the Lost Valley Ranch community of visitors, fans and followers.
The resulting site is more robust than a Facebook page, and serves as more of a college alumni-style site. Users create their own identities, share photos, videos and stories of their stays at the ranch. They also communicate with remote friends and family for trip planning, post blogs and create custom groups. Lost Valley Ranch is able to join these conversations and communicate with these folks as well, giving them more opportunity to engage, inform, build loyalty and generate repeat visitations. The site, lostvalleysocial.com, is a new hub in the Lost Valley Ranch marketing portfolio, creating a new generation of fully engaged brand advocates and ambassadors.
