Serious Detination Marketing Essential #4: If the story you tell doesn’t match reality, THEIR story will spread faster than yours.

Destination marketing should tell a story… a compelling story about the traveler and the transformative power of their visit to your location. The story should be simple, and powerful, and compelling.

Of course, such a story will be setting an expectation for the traveler. If you set the stage, the traveler had better experience something exceptional. Otherwise, he will leave feeling duped…and that’s bad.

And I don’t mean bad as in you’ll lose a fan and he’ll never come back. It’s not just the old saw about keeping a current customer being far less expensive than winning a new customer. That’s old news.

The new news is that, this traveler is on MySpace, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Flickr. This traveler has a blog. He’s on Twitter. He has a group of close friends in the dozens, an intimate network in the hundreds, and an extended network in the thousands. And with a few strokes of the keyboard, he can let them all know that you’re full of it. And he’s not likely to be flattering or to pull any punches.

An essential aspect, then, of your destination marketing is authenticity. If you’re genuine in your message about what visiting your location entails, if you can deliver on what you’re promising your targets, then that same traveler will tell his network how incredible you are. He’ll write about it, and he’ll talk about it and he’ll probably post pictures of it.

And if you can’t tell your story with compelling authenticity, you have a problem destination marketing can’t fix. You might not even have a destination at all.

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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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