Serious Detination Marketing Essential #3: Put the shotgun down and pick up the blowgun instead.

The expensive destination marketing ad buys can get ridiculous. 5 figures for a one-time ad? Maybe 3 ads, depending on the publication you’re going after? And for what?

Half the readers of the publication aren’t even going to see your ad. And only a fraction of those that do are going to be in your target market.

Rather than shooting at everything that moves with a general ad that tries to appeal to everyone and hope you hit something worthwhile, you should be tightly focusing in on the particular marketing segments, and tailoring great ads to those specific markets.

So, you have great “outdoor life?” What kind? Families who are going car camping? Adventure trekkers out for a two-week hike in the backwoods? Off-road biking? Bass fishing? Fly fishing?

These are all entirely unique segments with little common ground between them…and that’s just the “outdoorsy” types. That doesn’t include your atrs scene, or your shopping and entertainment, or your history tours, or any of a dozen different great things about your location.

Your best bet, if you’re a CVB looking to get the most out of their destination marketing is to get yourself some local people who are into each scene (not business owners, but the actual patrons themselves)—say five or six people who are very active in their particular area of interest—and pay them $300 a month to maintain a blog about that (Three posts per week) and a special “press pass” of 50% to those venues where they do what they like to do.

Or find out who some big names are in those circles, and invite them on an expense-paid trip to experience everything your locale has to offer. What kind of publicity would that generate?

Or create a weekend festival to celebrate that aspect of your community.

Support the local venues in your community (I mean really support them), and they will build the word of mouth you need to bring in the visitors.

And the same holds true for restaurants, shops, tourist attractions, recreational facilities and resorts. Make it easy for the right people to find you, and you won’t have to go out looking for them.

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The Essentials of Destination Marketing.

Okay, so here’s the overview: what must take place in order to create a killer destination marketing campaign.

1. Forget about your destination for a moment and focus on the traveler. Forget what you think you know about selling the benefits instead of the features. You have to go way beyond that.

2. Find a SINGLE VOICE that expresses the attitude of your destination. You can’t be all things to all people. And you’ll never create an ad that everyone likes. Focus on the people who SHOULD come to your place.

3. Put the shotgun down and pick up the blowgun instead. And, no, I’m not explaining this here…you’ll just have to keep reading.

4. If the story you tell doesn’t match reality, THEIR story will spread faster than yours.

5. There is no room for egos or agendas. Either it’s about the traffic or it isn’t. Leave the belt-notching for the WaterWorks Board.

There you have it, a crash-course in destination marketing. Follow these guidelines, and you can create a campaign that will generate traffic for a decade or longer. Ignore them, and go the way of the ghost town. Now…let’s look at how we put these into play.

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