Below are tips Destination Marketing Organizations can use to accomplish common goals.
Attract Quality Visitors with Higher Spend
Because online marketing provides DMOs with more transparency and efficiency, there has been a huge shift to spend more online. However, the role of the destination marketer remains the same: Attract quality visitors that result in higher in-market spend.
So what metrics can you use to identify and target high quality visitors that will spend more in your market?
- Average Daily Rate (ADR) by Origin Market
- Length of Stay (LOS) by Origin Market
By identifying Origin Markets with the highest ADR and LOS, you can begin crafting a marketing strategy to target quality visitors that are going to spend more in your market and for more days.
Measuring Destination Marketing Success
Validating media spend is very important for DMOs as limited budgets are the norm. Every destination marketer needs to provide justification into how their ad campaigns are contributing to the local economy.
One particular area of interest is event marketing. After all, which destination marketer doesn’t dream of bringing the Olympics to their town. But how can we measure the effectiveness of events to justify doing them?
First, you need to tag your marketing campaigns to develop an audience of travelers exposed to your advertising.
Second, estimate traveler spend for your exposed audience. The easiest way to do this is by multiplying the average daily rate with the length of stay for exposed travelers.
Last, use the following formula to develop return on ad spend (ROAS):
ROAS = money spent on advertising ÷ estimated traveler spend of exposed audiences
ROAS is the easiest way to justify return on marketing investment as it provides a metric that destinations can use to benchmark events.
Maximizing Data to Drive Tourism Revenue
Destination Marketing Organizations face tough challenges to grow tourism revenue:
- DMOs need to expand their reach and attract new visitors in new channels as visitors change how they plan plan their journey
- DMOs need to better understand visitor preferences so they can make better marketing decisions and investments
- DMOs need timely insights to increase ROI of their marketing investments and identify the most valuable segments
What are the most relevant data points that will help you make the best decisions and discover the best audience segments? Start by analyzing your audiences and campaigns along these three views and see how their ADR, LOS, and Origin Markets change:
- Ecosystem Activity: Measure visitors to your destination for a specific date ranges that correlate to your seasonality to understand where high-value visitors come from and what they do in-destination.
- Influenced Visitation: Review which campaigns are driving incremental visitors and understand their contribution to revenue.
- Trip-Planning Timeline: Understand how different origin markets plan their visits so that you can begin customizing campaigns to target visitors more efficiently.
Use Creative Testing to Discover What Motivates Travelers to Visit
You can discover what attracts visitors to your destination is by leveraging creative testing. Traditionally, creative testing has been used to only to maximize impressions and clicks. However, by tagging the entire journey, from impression to visitation, destinations can begin understanding what really influences a traveler’s to visit their region.
How to get started
- Start with a wide variety of creatives that highlight all the experiences your destination has to offer. The key is to keep a consistent design across each creative to reduce bias that may be introduced from different designs.
- Allot a budget that will offer statistically significant results and select a platform to traffic your campaign. Platforms that allow view-through tracking will work best as they will show the influence of the creative.
- Create unique tracking for each creative and traffic your campaign with equal weighting for each creative during the test period. It is important not to change weighting during this time as to not introduce bias.
- After the campaign is complete, begin reviewing visitation data for each creative to understand what is driving travelers to visit.
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
DMOs are always asking us how they can make the data they receive more actionable. Below, we’ve developed a framework that can be leveraged to discover insights that can be acted upon.
1. Build context around what you are trying to achieve
DMOs need to answer various questions to their board and they mainly revolve around quantifying visitation, understanding visitor interests, and justifying marketing spend. Begin by narrowing in on the particular questions that are the most pressing to your destination and stakeholders so that you can begin collecting the right data.
2. Map out the expected outcome
What would the answer to your question look like once the data has been analyzed. The reason this is important is because it can change the type of data you source.
For example, if you are looking to understand visitor interests, your answer can look like:“The top 10 places visitors go to in my destinations are…”
Or it can look like:“The top 5 experiences visitors in my destination are searching for are…”
Notice how the data required to the answer those questions is quite different. The first requires in-destination data while the second requires online search data.
3. Collect and analyze data
Once you determine what data you need to answer your questions, you will need to source the appropriate data and analyze it for patterns and trends.
Relevant and reputable data will help you surface answers very quickly so ensure you obtain quality data sources.
4. Test and improve
Once you’ve answered your question, you can move to validate or improve your current marketing efforts by taking those answers and building campaigns around them.
For example, once you understand the top 10 places visitors go to in your destination, you can develop creative that matches those destinations and see if it improves response and visitation.