We recently had the pleasure connecting with Visit Savannah to learn more about how Destination Marketing Organizations overcome some of the challenges of driving visitation.
Adara: What is your name and role at Visit Savannah?
Zeek: I’m Zeek Coleman and my title is Interactive Marketing Manager. I’m basically the digital nerd of our team and buy all digital media. I’m tasked with helping to plan the spend, optimize for maximum return and report on results to key stakeholders. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Adara: Savannah is a wonderful destination and used as a backdrop in a lot of movies like Forrest Gump and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, so it must be easy to get visitors to come.
Zeek: Savannah is beautiful and the people are amazing, but it actually takes a lot of work from a lot of people to get visitors to come on an ongoing basis, year-after-year. Travelers have so many options nowadays.
Adara: What are some of the challenges you have as Destination Marketing Organization bringing in visitors?
Zeek: DMOs are in the unique position of selling a product we don’t control. Gathering information from our partners can be a challenge and time consuming, but that’s often been a legitimate way of understanding our market.
That might involve contacting each hotel to see how they’re pacing over the next couple of months, which probably lacks accuracy. Once we have the booking data from the hotels, we can then figure out if we need to put together a marketing program to fill rooms and attempt to drive revenue on the right dates. If something changes in the booking pace, we won’t actually know until it’s too late or perhaps if we go back and ask each hotel again. This can become a tedious/un-scientific process that probably isn’t worth the time and effort involved.
Another issue with this approach is the fact that 4-5 big hotel partners are not necessarily representative of a vast majority of our market. So these small data sets can really skew how we think things are pacing and lead us in the wrong direction. This doesn’t give you a complete picture of what’s going on and often isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison from partner to partner.
Thankfully, Adara created Adara Market Monitor which saves us time and helps us make better decisions, so we can focus our time on actual marketing, not gathering market data.
Adara: You use Market Monitor as data collection tool to save you time?
Zeek: Not primarily…we actually use it for more than that. Market Monitor collects, analyzes and presents the data in a format that was so immediately accessible to staff, they asked for access to it to identify need periods and adjust content calendars. So it’s saved time, but also expanded our ability to tie everything we do to our ultimate goal and drive revenue. Since using Market Monitor, there are many occasions where we’ve adjusted our strategy after seeing things more objectively. It’s been really enlightening and allowed us to move the needle and tell a better story. It also gives us a holistic picture of Savannah and we get up to date data since Adara refreshes the data frequently and automatically.
Adara: Market Monitor helps you react to market conditions?
Zeek: Better than that, it helps us be proactive before trouble hits. With it, we can identify need periods at a glance, see convention bookings as they come in and get ahead of unforeseen holes in the calendar.
We start with Market Monitor’s booking predictions vs actual bookings data and charts to help us monitor status as well as compare how current bookings are compared to last year. It helps us understand if there are any anomalies and we can then go back and figure out what might be causing the anomalies to prepare for them in the future.
The competitive booking information provides us with another layer of valuable information since we can compare how we are doing compared to other similar destinations in our area.
Adara: How do you go about bringing more visitors to Savannah?
Zeek: There are different ways to attract new visitors but knowing where current visitors are coming from is the 1st step. Market Monitor’s Origin Markets data is a great feature since it quickly and clearly shows us where and how many visitors are coming to Savannah.
We can focus our efforts on top performing lucrative markets. Market Monitor helps us target travelers and markets that have a higher propensity to come visit, spend more, stay longer, or travel in larger groups. We can also plan for growth in other markets.
Adara: I’m glad to hear you’ve found Market Monitor so useful. It seems to have made your job a little easier.
Zeek: With Market Monitor the decision making is scientific and objective. We can adjust our plans then come back and see if we are pacing well. We can use it as a tactical tool to quickly fill gaps/vacancies and it’s easier to use than many competing solutions. We quickly absorb and understand the information and even used Market Monitor to plan our strategy for this year’s summer campaign. It definitely makes my job easier and allows me to be more effective.
Adara: So you are using it to develop your strategy?
Zeek: Yep, I actually just got out of a meeting where we were planning our winter campaign and were blown away with how integral it was in our planning. But when you couple it with Adara Impact Plus, it’s like having all the infinity stones, lol. It’s even more powerful since you can measure the results of your marketing afterwards with IMPACT Plus based on the insights you gain from Market Monitor. On top of that, Impact Plus has a great feature called “Market Visitation” that everyone should check out. It tells you where your visitors are coming from.
You get insights to plan your marketing with Market Monitor and then measure the results with Impact Plus. We make adjustments all in a single offering from Adara (i.e. Destination Marketing Cloud) and couldn’t be happier.
Adara: Thank you Zeek for spending time with this.
Zeek: It was a pleasure sharing and don’t forget to swing by and Visit Savannah!