Your Beach. Found – find your beach then find your stay
Winner: Beach Retreats
Award: Best Content Campaign, 2025: Gold
“Really inspiring content to draw the crowds in - a creative campaign that matched the personalisation of where they were advertising on social media and that leant into the fun of a holiday - elevates the brand beyond functional accommodation into an experience-based proposition”
Brief
Regional visitor numbers down. Real incomes falling. Hospitality businesses cutting back. Large booking platforms gaining market share. The media and the public tired from overexposure to the 'Cornwall' brand and staycation marketing through COVID-19. Booking lead times shortening. The list goes on. When trading conditions are like an enduring bad day at sea, how to inspire wanderlust, capture imaginations, and reimagine familiar locations to turn the tide?
In 2025, Beach Retreats – a small, Cornish self-catering agency managing 220 privately owned properties – needed to stand out and connect with audiences more than ever.
To do that, it worked it needed to devise a content campaign that would effectively communicate its mission and unique selling proposition (all properties located within walking distance to the beach) – strengthening the brand identity and how it connects with guests.
It was looking for a content-led marketing campaign that would re-engage an existing audience and help extend that reach to a new beach-loving audience.
With a limited budget, the content had to work hard to deliver organic results with a need to work collaboratively to maximise reach. The campaign also needed to be co-ordinated across multiple channels: website, email, owned and earned social.
With an in-house marketing team of just two and without access to a full service creative agency, co-ordination and collaboration also needed to extend to a multi-agency team bringing together concept and content production by Stranger Collective, visual design by A-Side, digital development by Gloversure and PR by Wildcard.
The in-house team at Beach Retreats would also be central, managing all social media and digital distribution, community management, content production and property promotion.
All in, a unifying campaign message was needed that could flow seamlessly into types of content, for a range of contributors to work with and to interest and engage the widest possible audience.
At the heart of the campaign was the desire to create something unique. Something that hadn't been seen or done before. A big challenge when it comes to the sheer volume of property and beach content out there.
Solution
With consumers tired from being pushed a high volume of holiday property content with endless discounting, Beach Retreats flipped the script. Find your beach match, then find your property there.
Beach Retreats is all about giving guests the chance to experience a beach entirely their way. With Your Beach. Found, Beach Retreat’s audience could be inspired by Beach Takeovers showing what different beaches offer through different perspectives and find their beach match through a fun digital quiz.
The campaign told compelling narratives from 12 beaches – a way of showing, and involving a broad audience in, the brand’s USP: giving guests the freedom of staying moments from a beach and the ability to choose the right beach for that unique holiday experience.
The campaign execution involved these elements:
A Beach Match Quiz featuring 20 locations across the Cornish Peninsula.
New creative collaborations to reimagine locations through the eyes of local artists, photographers and filmmakers.
Local business partnerships, handing the mic to the people that create the beachside experience – content that captured imaginations and prompted the best type of endorsement: fond reminiscence of a favourite holiday past.
'Gone with the tide' flash sales for properties at each takeover location and competitions to galvanise engagement and action.
PR and influencer stays co-ordinated with each beach takeover, more beach perspectives, more opportunities to resonate.
Execution relied on collaboration that enhanced the brand’s position as an expert in beach holidays: bringing a range of local businesses into the campaign and local creative practitioners, showcasing their work and their approach.
Excellence came through creative copywriting to evocatively capture the feel and experience of different beaches, brand visuals that captured the essence of the journey the audience could go on to find their beach and original artwork made at each of the 12 beaches featured in the 2025 campaign, from night sky photography to sculptural seascape paintings to atmospheric film.
In this campaign, every beach had an identity and every member of the audience could find the beach that was the right fit for them – their beach.
Results
The location-specific storytelling is still reaching audiences through these channels as the campaign runs until the end of September:
Rolling email newsletters were sent to 107,000 people during the campaign.
26,721 users have found their 'Beach Match' through the Beach Match Quiz.
170 videos, image galleries and animated visuals @beachretreats on Instagram reached 4.4 million total views by September, attracting 53,337 likes, 14,423 comments, 3,993 shares and 4,319 saves.
These posts included collaborative posts with more than 30 local businesses and creatives, extending the reach of the campaign storytelling into earned channels.
The Beach Book and other pages on the Beach Retreats website received 56% more visits from social media during the campaign compared to the same period last year.
Influencer stays at takeover locations reached an additional 1.74 million followers. Across Instagram and TikTok, the total number of posts reached 186, 53,799 likes, 1,006 comments and 1.03 million views.
The campaign has delivered a significant uplift in revenue. Tracking bookings from flash sales at each beach takeover location shows a 132% average increase in bookings revenue at these location compared to the same period last year.
Just taking that revenue figure, the sub £50,000 campaign budget delivered a revenue return of five times its cost.
The total impact of the campaign is far greater, In the short term, bookings are up 13% for this financial year (ending in February 2026). Taking into account the revenue from bookings that fall in the next financial year, revenue is up 36% – showing the longer-term impact of this growth in awareness and engagement of the Beach Retreats brand.
Beach Match Quiz: https://www.beachretreats.co.uk/beach-match-quiz