Your budget is tightening. You need new visitors to spend in your destination, but you probably have fewer marketing dollars to make it happen. It’s crucial to reach the right people efficiently and understand the real impact of your efforts.
While ROI measurement is a challenge for all marketers, it can be an even greater challenge for destination marketing organizations, who need to answer to taxpayers for every dollar they spend on marketing efforts.
Considering the tourism industry’s current methods of marketing and associated challenges with measurement, that’s no easy task.
Tourism marketers today are typically measuring success in two ways:
Additionally, many marketing partners can measure soft metrics and bookings using cookies and device IDs, but few have a view of the consumer on the individual level.
With only cookies and device IDs for measurement, you’re unable to get an accurate view of who actually visits your location and what they spend across categories while they are in your destination.
This gives you an extremely limited view into the net economic impact of your marketing efforts. Thankfully, there’s a better alternative.
Instead of these soft metrics and bookings, your focus should be on achieving a holistic understanding of your customers—across, channels, devices and spending habits. A complete view of every customer helps you to understand how each person spends across retail, tours, restaurants, grocery and more while they’re in your destination—even if they don’t book a plane ticket or a hotel room.
With this information, you can understand the true net economic impact of each individual’s trip based on actual transactions. You can connect individual online behavior with offline spend, giving you the full picture of your marketing attribution.
Let’s say Susan has been searching online for a warm weather vacation. She recently purchased a new beach towel. She’s visited Miami in the past and has been reading travel blogs. You can serve her messaging across all of her devices to inspire her to take a trip to your beach town (all while protecting her privacy).
Once she sees the ads and visits your locale, you can measure all of her non-cash transactions—her trip to the grocery store to stock her rental’s kitchen, her fancy dinner out, the gas to fuel her rental car and more.
You can even use personalized messaging to showcase your destination after her initial visit in a meaningful way, reminding Susan of her past vacation and why she may want to visit again in the coming months.
To get this more accurate measurement of your marketing performance and its economic impact, you’ll need to make sure your marketing partner can provide you with the right data and services. Ask them these four questions to find out if they can offer you the insights you need to show successful marketing.
Most vendors don’t factor in offline sales, focusing only on cookies and device IDs, which expire over time (cookies after 90 days or less), making it difficult to connect with people over longer periods of time. You need to be able to talk to the people that have visited your destination in the past, which could be up to a full year ago.
Digital display is great for driving awareness, but video also has the power to showcase your destination’s unique differentiators in a compelling way. It’s important to work with digital marketing partners that can optimize your campaign based on which format works best and in what patterns.
For example, your team could find that showing two video ads to an individual and then following up with more display ads is the optimal media pattern. Your partner needs the skills, expertise and tools to identify these conversions and know why.
You also need to be able to understand each consumer across their multiple devices.
You should not just be putting impressions in front of devices—you need to put impressions in front of people, which is not easily understood in the online context. Here’s a good explainer of how you can recognize people online for more information.
If your marketing partner is focused on soft metrics or airline and hotel spend, you need to ask yourself if this enough for you. If you want more accurate measurement of your ROI and the ability to see that return across restaurants, nightlight, groceries and more, there is a much more comprehensive data set that shows breakout across previously unmeasured categories at your destination.
If you’re relying on online or booking metrics alone, you’re not measuring the full value of your ad dollars. You should be able to show all of your stakeholders how your marketing program boosted the economy, drove additional tax revenue and positively impacted the quality of life for residents.
This approach to better understanding your customers shows the real value of each of your transactors—as opposed to just the overall number of visitors—and should influence your marketing strategy moving forward.
Interested in learning more? Learn more about how we work with destination marketers.