As you may have heard, Asbury Park is back. Rising from the rubble that’s literally been piling up on vacant lots over the past two decades, the town has seen a resurgence unlike anywhere on the East Coast. With summer fast approaching in 2018 and the famous boardwalk prepping for visitors, sprucing up its digital marketing approach was a top priority.

Enter By & Large (that’s us). Our plan: to deploy social media ad campaigns that entice people to rediscover the Asbury Park Boardwalk, which is owned by real estate developer Madison Marquette. With the music scene already drawing plenty of crowds, we’d focus on promoting new restaurants, tasty pop-up food spots and amazing boutique shopping.

But first, their website, which needed to better reflect the boardwalk experience and support future social media ad campaigns, as both a landing destination and mechanism for retargeting and building audiences.

After launching the revamped site in time for Memorial Day weekend, it was time to launch our social media ads, with the goal of raising awareness beyond the local scene to tourists within a 120-mile drive, while increasing overall web traffic.

The results were as eye-popping as the colorful murals that line the mile-long boardwalk. Our summer ad campaigns delivered over 6 million impressions and built new regional custom audiences of over 200,000 people who had demonstrated an interest in our ads. They also resulted in 30,000 landing page views at a $0.52 CPV (a more effective metric than typical CPC targets), which created high-quality opportunities for retargeting.

Year-over-year, the website saw huge upticks in social media traffic from our campaigns—a measurable difference than from several national editorial features, which created no significant spikes in traffic.

Yes, Asbury Park is back. But with our help, the boardwalk is better than ever.