The Ultimate Outdoor Resort Marketing Playbook

Unlike last week’s dispatch on resort construction, this week’s subject is something I’m actually qualified to talk about.

Marketing.

I’m sharing what I’ve learnt from working with Skyridge Glamping, and from building relationships with the slickest in the business.

Specifically, I’m sharing the marketing playbook I’d use if I were opening a brand new resort tomorrow.

We’ll name the resort “Mountain Glamping”. It’s a magical place in the Rockies, with beautiful, high-end cabins, attracting a demographic willing to pay more than $500 USD per night. (No, this doesn’t sound familiar at all).

Ready? Let’s dive in.

The 3-Pronged Strategy

If this were a film scene, this is where I’d clear the table, spread out a map, and say: “Right boys, here’s the plan.”

Our Mountain Glamping marketing strategy has three pillars:

1. Organic social media

2. Paid ads

3. Email

1. Organic Social Media

Social media is everything in this game. It’s where our guests live, and where they’ll find you.

Instagram can be particularly lucrative. Just ask Onera or Live Oak Lake, who nailed their Instagram games and made serious money.

Get this right, and the rest of our marketing becomes secondary.

But what is organic social media?

Instagram Reels

This is the bread and butter.

Instagram’s algorithm loves Reels, not static photos. That’s why your feed is now 80% short-form video, showing you recipes, outfit ideas, and, in my case, clips of drunk British idiots doing dumb things.

At Skyridge, this simple 10-second clip of the season’s first snowfall hit 46k views and 259 shares — 259 people sending it directly to their friends. That’s the kind of behaviour that drives bookings.

Reels that perform best mix short clips together (like drone flyovers, cabin walk-throughs, and cozy bedroom reveals) with well-chosen soundtracks and well-timed captions.

The challenge? Consistent content.

Two ways to solve it:

• The premium route: Hire pros like Oasi or The Content House a few times a year to batch-shoot and edit content. Expensive, but you’ll get guaranteed quality.

• The scrappy route: Invite influencers early on. Offer free stays in exchange for a collab post and raw footage you can repurpose all year. That’s what Skyridge did.

Mountain Glamping has plenty of cash to burn, so we’ll go down the premium route. But the scrappy route can be great if you’re counting your pennies.

Influencers

Influencers are cheat codes for reach. They understand the algorithm and produce gold-standard content.

We’ll invite selected creators to stay at Mountain Glamping for free, in return for:

• 1 Reel, posted in collaboration with our account

• 3+ Instagram Stories

• Full rights to all raw footage for future use

We’ll look beyond follower counts and focus on engagement instead. We’ll look at shares, comments and saves, to assess influencer performance. And we’ll use tools like Upfluence for sourcing and tracking.

Media Collabs

A bit of spend here can go a long way.

Forget old-school print newspapers (great as they were). The modern equivalent is local social media outlets.

Skyridge partnered with Date Night Calgary for a giveaway that pulled 161k views, 11.8k comments, and 960 shares. Here’s the case study.

So, to launch Mountain Glamping, we’ll do the same. We’ll run a giveaway that gets people to follow, like, and tag a friend.

Instant buzz.

2. Paid Ads

In a perfect world, your organic content fills our booking calendar. In reality, we’ll want ads to plug any remaining availability.

We’ll run two types:

Social Ads

We’ll choose our best-performing organic Reels as the creative, tweaking where necessary, and run two main ads:

• Awareness ads: Spread the word and build followers

• Conversion ads: Target warm audiences — followers, engagers, website visitors — with special offers or “limited spots” messaging.

Google Ads

We might be moving into the age of AI-first search, but Google Ads still work.

We’ll allocate a small budget to capture people searching for glamping and similar stays in our local area. 

To ensure we’re maximizing the value of our ad spend, we’ll spend time crafting great copy and effective landing pages, so the booking process is as seamless as possible.

3. Emails

The starting point with email marketing is to make sure you’re capturing email addresses in the first place.

The good thing is, it’s pretty easy.

We’ll implement a website popup, inviting people who spend more than 5 seconds on our website to provide their email address.

We’ll test a few variations of this message to find the optimal email catcher. We’ll offer them a small discount, or a free add-on, or a competition entry. We’ll also simply ask them for our email without giving a perk in return.

Once the testing is done and we’re getting a steady stream of sign-ups, we’ll focus on the emails we send.

We won’t be too spammy with our emails. That just invites unsubscribes. Instead, we’ll thoughtfully share updates and content that makes our email list feel connected to our resort.

We’ll also share last-minute availability, special offers and other promotions with the email list, without overdoing it.

Finally, we’ll segment our email list, so we can send targeted emails to specific guests. That way, we can speak directly to our most loyal guests, or send them some love on their birthdays and anniversaries.

Final Thoughts

If you’re short on time or budget, go all-in on social. It’s the single most powerful lever for driving bookings.

Paid ads and email are nice add-ons. Think of them as the cherry on top.

But nail all three, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.