The DMO Download

A weekly digest for those who market and manage destinations.

Prepare Your Destination for Any Crisis

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Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Things From This Week’s News Roundup

As you start preparing for the winter holidays, it’s the perfect time to dive into some of the biggest resources we’ve gathered this week. Learn about preparing for destination crises, facilitating inclusion in your marketing strategy, building brand ambassador programs and so much more in our latest DMO Download. Keep reading!

Crisis Management for Destinations

When it comes to natural or manmade disasters, no destination is truly safe. Since we never know when a crisis will strike, it’s important to have the right mindset to prepare for and handle crises of all kinds. When developing a recovery plan for your destination or heritage area, there are some key principles to keep in mind:

  • Don’t just invest in good equipment, also invest in good people. People are the ones that directly help with crisis recovery, not the equipment. Have a quality team at the ready who can handle anything that comes their way.
  • Remember that empathy is vital in crisis response. While the tourism industry in your region could be adversely affected, your residents, employees and their families are also at risk. Make sure your employees are safe and have had time to check in with their families before asking them to help with tourism recovery.
  • Never assume that your destination is safe from a crisis. The most important part of crisis recovery is having a plan in place. Taking time to prepare plans for any possible catastrophe is a vital step in ensuring your visitors, employees and community can recover smoothly and safely.
  • One factor is not enough to to help tourism in your community recover. The best recovery programs are a combination of coordinated steps all working together: crisis management, marketing, incentive programs, etc. all work together to help your industry recover.

Marketing plays a big role in all of these principles. Communicating clearly, authentically and empathetically ensures that your visitors have a clear understanding of what’s happening, allowing them to plan according to your recovery process. For your community, showing that there is a solid path for tourism recovery will give them hope that things will return to normal. A well-executed, thoughtful plan can make all the difference in ensuring your community and tourism industry rebound quickly and safely.

Facilitating Conscious Inclusion in Your Tourism Marketing Strategy

In tourism, inclusion allows diversity and local cultures to thrive while ensuring equitable access to travel for everyone, while also embracing people’s unique and complex experiences. More and more travelers are choosing destinations that are inclusive to all kinds of people. Your travelers may be diverse, but they all have one thing in common: they want to be welcomed at your destination.

There are so many ways to include diversity into your tourism marketing. Including more pictures and videos with a diverse set of travelers is one simple and powerful way to do this. Other DMOs, such as All Inclusive Boston and Visit Hershey and Harrisburg’s bilingual road tour we talked about in last week’s DMO Download, are finding out-of-the-box ways to celebrate and encourage diversity. Take stock of your destination. What creative ways can you implement to celebrate your destination’s unique cultural and people groups?

When brainstorming these ideas, it’s vital to talk to your local cultural and people groups first. Getting to know how they want to be represented not only shows that you care about their ideas, but will also portray a more authentic picture of your community. Read these guidelines for advice and insight on thoughtfully implementing inclusion and diversity in your marketing strategy.

Why Brand Ambassadors Should Be a Part of Your DMO’s Marketing Strategy

By far, one of the most powerful marketing tools is word-of-mouth and influencer marketing. Instituting a brand ambassador program avoids transactional, impersonal relationships with your audience, instead creating real, authentic relationships with influencers and get them on board with your destination.

Finding influencers whose interests align with what your destination has to offer is a great start in building a community of people who are posting positively about your region. While it might seem overwhelming to build an entire program, the effort is definitely worth it. Learn how powerful an influencer engagement can be here.

Before building your ambassador network, there are a few things you should keep in mind:

  • Identify your larger business goals beforehand. Then, you can work out how ambassadors will help you achieve them.
  • Identify the right influencers for your program. Be sure to evaluate how many followers they have, what their niche is and what kinds of content they create.
  • Build a meaningful incentive model that will be attractive to your content creator network.
  • Structure a resource plan and a point of contact to help manage your network and supply them with what they need to present your destination accurately.

Working closely with your brand ambassadors will increase awareness about your destination, authentically promote your community’s brand and maintain strong relationships with your content creators and their audiences.

What DMOs Can Learn From The Avengers About Stakeholder Buy-in

We learn from stories— and that’s why movies are such powerful teaching tools. So when Bull Moose Marketing’s VP of Client Strategy, Ron Mattocks, told us that he learned about stakeholder buy-in from The Avengers, it didn’t come as a surprise.

It takes a village to give visitors a good experience, so getting stakeholder buy-in is essential when it comes to developing a good, consistent destination brand. Your brand represents your whole community, making it vital to involve the community in your branding efforts. Getting everyone on board is not always easy. But, as The Avengers show us, it’s possible for independent and talented individuals to join together and become one unstoppable force. In our latest blog, Ron highlights the seven important steps The Avengers took in achieving this trust and reveals how DMOs can apply this to their relationships with their stakeholders.

For even more branding insights, watch our on-demand webinar or check out this resource.

This Lookbook Is Full of Content Reuse Ideas

The thought of constantly creating new content is enough to make anyone feel even a little overwhelmed. As we’ve highlighted in some past DMO Downloads, you don’t have to create new content for your digital platforms every time. Instead, reusing content allows you to save time creating original content, giving your past hard work a new life.

Reusing content can look different for every DMO and heritage area depending on your digital platforms, your audience and your amenities. Promotional videos can be clipped into short videos for social media; blog excerpts can be used as social media posts; photos can be used between social media, blogs and website content and so much more.

To inspire your content reuse creativity, Content Marketing Institute partnered with Tenovos to share a creative lookbook featuring major brands who reused their content in unique and engaging ways. Download the full booklet for free here.

  • Paige Schamberg

    Content Production Manager at Bull Moose Marketing. A lover of literature and a sunshine enthusiast who probably drinks too much tea. Connect with me on LinkedIn @paigeschamberg

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