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.

Thanks for visiting Serious Destination Marketing.

 

Serious Detination Marketing Essential #2: Find a SINGLE VOICE that expresses the attitude of your destination.

Your destination marketing is a message best delivered by a single, specific, attitude-packed voice.

I know, you want everyone to come see how incredible you are. But that just isn’t going to happen. Period.

The more general and generic your message, the less effectively it will communicate what makes you so great. So step out of that “safe zone” and proudly tell those people who are most likely to get a lot out of a visit, exactly what it is they will get out of it.

And say it in a way that will resonate with those people, even if it runs the risk of turning off entire other demographic groups. Chances are, they were never “yours” anyway. And even if they are, we’ll look at how to get them back a little later.

Thanks for visiting Serious Destination Marketing.

 

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.

Thanks for visiting Serious Destination Marketing.