Destination Marketing - Tourism
As with tourism, destination marketing’s purpose is to increase visitors; however, it is unique in that the focus is on promoting an overall area such as a town, city, or region. It’s also the only industry where you have to bring customers to the product which means positioning a particular destination as an attractive brand beforehand. This requires a different set of marketing tactics, but it also allows for a lot of creativity as well.
Having a solid marketing strategy is crucial to building a brand, attracting new visitors, and gaining loyalty. Awareness is key in destination marketing which is why so many resources are dedicated to these efforts; however, demonstrating differentiation and delivering on that experience can destroy those efforts. What’s more, there are more stakeholders involved who represent the hospitality, cultural, and services industries within a destination, making it difficult to sync efforts without a clear plan for everyone to buy into.
For many rural communities, tourism provides a large source of revenue, and it does much to build economic resiliency. Tourism also provides a boost to travel-oriented businesses and local businesses whose focus is not directly related to tourism. Ultimately, tourism can be a sustainable means of economic development for rural communities who understand how to leverage marketing their destinations as a whole.
However, depending on the destination and its amenities, the marketing tactics and tools required will vary. For instance, marketers need to understand when to concentrate on contextual ads, search engine ads or social media channels while knowing how to best target audiences based on multiple factors such as interests, location, seasons, and more. And because visitors can share all the emotions associated with their travel experience, having a solid destination marketing plan is necessary unless you want visitors telling your story for you.
These are just a few of the considerations that visitor’s bureaus and destination managers need an agency partner to understand. Bull Moose offers both comprehensive and seasonal campaign Square Deal along with the resources required to put these strategies in place.
Learn more about the marketing strategies that helped Bull Moose’s destination clients below.
Bull Moose Progressive Marketing has helped us with several major marketing campaigns. At the Visitor’s Bureau, we look for Return on Investment and detailed analytic reports to help guide us in future advising markets - Bull Moose provides this. They made a major difference in our Social Media, generating web leads and introducing Google mapping projects for our constituents. We all want to know where our customer comes from, how to keep in contact with them, and what are they interested in. Again, I have two words for you “Bull Moose”. They are now working on making our website more appealing and easier to navigate as well as a new Fall Campaign. Our partnership with them will definitely be a long-term one.
-Juanita Hampton, Executive Director, Crawford County Convention and Visitors Bureau
Awareness Campaigns
Having spent much of their budget on ineffective awareness campaigns, the Crawford County Visitors Bureau needed a cost-effective solution that could also show measurable results. Learn how multiple, overlapping seasonal campaigns achieved this through, SEO, social media, email, and engaging content.
Customer Loyalty
With their busiest two seasons approaching, Port Farms required an immediate plan for encouraging customer loyalty while also creating awareness for their newest experience offering. Find out how email and social media were used to drive organic audience engagement and help them sell out of tickets each weekend.
Targeted Digital Ads
In a collaborative effort to promote downtown Meadville businesses during the Christmas shopping season, multiple stakeholders sought to generate awareness of the community in nearby metro markets. Learn how this was accomplished through targeted social media advertising and a video commercial that quickly went viral.
