Nordic Valley sits in the valley between Snowbasin and Powder Mountain in Utah. It’s my home mountain. It’s the place where, on bluebird spring weeks like this, I’ll try to wrap up most days with a few slushy turns under the sun.

Now, when you’re flanked by massive, sprawling resorts with thousands of acres it can be easy to think that skiers can manage to navigate your little base area and few hundred acres just fine. But Nordic Valley skiers aren’t your typically savvy riders. On a busy weekend you’ll see thousands of people driving up who will be visiting a resort for the first time in their lives. Not just this ski resort, any ski resort. They haven’t explored new resorts a dozen times to know the patterns and look for the cues. They don’t know how all of this works, a challenge slightly amplified by Nordic’s lodge burning down a few years ago and scattering once centralized operations across a few temporary buildings.

Last week a friend was in town so I grabbed him a ticket so we could take a few runs together. I put the ticket under a different email than I normally use. Which means, for that day at least, I was a never-ever in the eyes of the resort.

The day before I arrived I got an email with this image at the top.

There are a few ways Nordic Valley could have solved this challenge.

• They could have recorded a walkthrough video
• They could have added a bunch of new resort signage
• They could have put more staff in place
• They could have gotten an update to their trail map

But they didn’t. And, honestly, this one image did as good a job as any of those things, because it did the job in a single glance. It’s taken from the direction skiers will arrive, it shows all the key places they’ll need, and it’s right at the top of an email that I’d guess 60%+ of them are going to see. There’s nothing the skiers need to have time/space to watch, there’s no extra budget needed to implement it, and it could be created in just a few minutes.

There is so often a parallel between a marketing message being great and a marketing message being simple. This is an example of that. They didn’t need something fancy, they needed something that solved a problem. And this photo did that perfectly.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.