Serious Detination Marketing Essential #1: Forget about your destination for a moment and focus on the traveler.

*Shock!* *Gasp!*

“But we have so much to say about our exceptional destination! Marketing it depends on us getting our story out!”

No. It doesn’t.

Here’s a bitter pill to swallow: no one cares about you. They don’t care about you’re history, your excitement, your refurbishment or your long list of attractions or amenities. That’s the problem we have to remedy in the first place…and you don’t do that by talking about yourself. Even forget what you think you know about selling benefits instead of amenities. You have to go much further than that.

What do they care about, then? Themselves. You have to convince them that they are going to have an experience beyond compare. Not “a relaxing vacation,” or a “nice break from the normal.” But an transformative experience that will change the way they look at…something. Life. Love. Family. The beach. Crabcakes. Whatever.

How do you do that? By painting a picture and placing them squarely in the middle of it.

That is the crux of strong destination marketing. If you can do that (and deliver the experience in reality), then your traffic will grow year after year. One of the things we’ll look at here is how to do just that.

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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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