4 Marketing Tips From The Most Successful Destination Marketing Organizations

1: Establish Goals

Setting clear goals is the first step great DMO’s take to create an effective marketing strategy. We refer to it as The Four W’s: Who, What, Where & When.

• Who is the target audience? Identifying target demographics is the foundation that successful campaigns are built on.
• What results are you trying to achieve? Getting high-quality website traffic, downloading a visitor’s guide or tracking foot traffic are examples of goals that many DMO’s have identified.
• Where do you want to focus your efforts? Identifying a target audience geography allows you to concentrate efforts and maximize results.
• When is the optimal time to run the campaign? For example: Is it year-round or seasonal?

Once these overall goals are established, developing the specifics of a marketing plan is much easier.

2: Research

Successful DMO’s create great marketing strategies by using data to establish customer profiles that include:

1. What are the visitors doing in-market?
2. Where are the visitors coming from?
3. When are the visitors coming?
4. How long are the visitors staying?
5. How much are the visitors spending?

3: Create a cohesive strategic plan 2-3 months prior to launching a campaign

Planning ahead is how DMO’s become successful. They are proactive not reactive and understand how each aspect of their campaigns fit together. Top DMO’s make sure that ad placement, social media, email and video strategies all complement one another so that each part supports and strengthens the other.  They understand that the message needs to be specific to each channel as well as each audience segment to create a coherent, successful campaign.

4: Campaign tracking is put in place prior to launch

Tracking a campaigns performance is just as important as research is to creating an effective campaign strategy.  Having the right analytic tools in place prior to launch gives successful DMO’s the ability to monitor performance and adjust the strategy as needed.  Not all analytics are created equal.  Some digital companies offer proprietary analytics that do not always tell the whole story.  Google Analytics is the most transparent way to understand how your campaign is performing.  It is the foundation that MediaOne uses to monitor our partners campaigns and we feel it is imperative to understand the difference between proprietary and true Google analytics.