Love’s research and media teams turned a wide-net cast into precision, transforming awareness spend into surgically-targeted, record-breaking bookings.
Travel Costa Mesa
Easy-Breezy Travel Planning
Seducing sun-seeking travelers with bullseye audience research and media buys.
A Broken-to-Bespoke Challenge
Travel Costa Mesa needed to move beyond general assumptions about travelers. Their awareness budget was working broadly, but they didn’t have a clear answer to who was most likely to convert from awareness to a real Costa Mesa visit. Without that, every dollar spent on awareness was a guess.
Without precise insight into planning timelines, media habits, and what makes a traveler choose Costa Mesa over literally anywhere else, the brand couldn’t connect inspiration to booking, or prove ROI where it actually mattered. Costa Mesa needed an insider’s read on its own audience.
Strategic Approach
Love went full insider, building a multi-phase research engine that combined hard data with human nuance.
The research team used quantitative surveys, qualitative focus groups, psychographic profiling, and channel mapping, all of which were analyzed using k-means clustering and validated for data integrity. The result was four distinct audience segments, each with its own personality, planning window and reason to fall for Costa Mesa.
Our media team took it from there, turning insight into action – synthesizing two segments into a primary target, building custom flightings around how each audience plans and travels, and mapping channels to exactly where
they spend their time.
Results
Love’s research and media teams stopped guessing and started seducing, turning four real audience segments into targeted, record-breaking bookings.
4 razor-sharp audience segments, built with k-means clustering and validated by Hubert Statistic Values
1 custom LGBTQ+ segment, co-developed with Travel Costa Mesa, for an audience that generic research always misses
2 dedicated channel strategies. One built for inspiration, one engineered for the close.
Bespoke media flighting for every segment, timed to the exact week each one starts dreaming, planning, and booking
Aligned creative from Costa Mesa’s agency, Love tuned into what makes each segment fall for the destination
Real-time optimization, because budget reallocation is a sport we play to with.
Everything we created
Love orchestrated a multi-phase audience research deep-dive (surveys, focus groups, the works), psychographic and demographic segmentation, k-means clustering modeling with data integrity, a custom LGBTQ+ travel segment, channel mapping, and flighting plans for specific audiences and an integrated media strategy built shoulder-to-shoulder with Travel Costa Mesa’s creative partner, Envoy.
