Top Tactics to Optimize Your Tourism Marketing Efforts (Without Touching Your Budget)

You’ve developed solid campaigns and eye-catching creative for your CVB or DMO and things are running smoothly. Great work! But travel in 2024 is only ramping up. To seize the moment, you have to go above and beyond to enhance your strategy — even if you’re working with a fixed budget.

From digging into your analytics to keeping your finger on the pulse of trends, there are simple yet often overlooked optimizations that can yield big results for your destination. Here are four of our favorite quick-hit, dollar-stretching techniques.

Amplify Your KPIs By Focusing on Key Ones

Reviewing your KPIs is standard practice and if your eyes automatically navigate to certain metrics every month, you’re not alone. But if you’ve become too comfortable with your analytics and never come away with actionable to-dos, you’re missing an opportunity to improve something somewhere. Consider these questions to help you figure out how to adapt your approach:

• Are you tracking the KPIs that still matter? Just like the seasons, the metrics you pay attention to should change. As your goals shift, it’s important to adjust what metrics you focus on, too. During the summer, attracting families may be your top priority, so metrics like website traffic to your family-friendly itineraries would be key. When winter rolls around and you’re targeting outdoor enthusiasts, pay close attention to social engagement on winter activity social posts.
• Are you tracking the right indicators of intent? Different metrics can signal where a guest is in their customer journey. For example, downloads of visitor guides show deep intent since someone is actively requesting that asset. But if you’re only measuring the consideration set, tracking social media followers is a better asset to focus on. The key is pinpointing the right metrics that align with your specific goals.
• Are you taking a holistic view of the data to identify trends over time? It’s tempting to review last month’s numbers and give them a thumbs-up. But if you do that without looking back further, you could be missing out on trends to capitalize on. Look beyond just the latest monthly numbers. Look into the last six weeks, eight weeks, and quarter. There are trends to be found the more you dig in. What are they telling you? You should be able to connect how your tourism marketing is — or isn’t — laddering up to the goals you set out to achieve.
• Are you involving anyone new to the data to uncover fresh opportunities you’ve overlooked? At a certain point, you get used to seeing the same metrics and obvious opportunities are overlooked. It happens to the best of us. At the same time, it can be daunting to come up with fresh ideas when you’re fresh out of problem solving prowess. Whatever you’re experiencing, pull in a colleague from another team to look at the data and see what trends or opportunities they identify. (Psst…We’re really good at that!)

Whether it’s your organic social media posts, your digital media campaigns, or the quality of PR coverage, there is always a tactic or two that could use some tweaking. Like your high school basketball coach used to lecture: There’s always room for improvement.

Revive Your Audience Lookalike Targeting With Up-to-Date Data

Stale data is as useless as a suitcase with a broken wheel. It takes up space and is virtually immovable, serving as a bleak reminder of where you’ve been instead of holding the potential for new adventures and opportunities.

However, like a brand new wheelie suitcase, Meta & Google operate much more effectively and efficiently with fresh, updated data to form accurate lookalike lists. So if you regularly overlook uploading clean lists to those platforms, you’re working with a broken suitcase.

Each CVB and DMO’s goals are different, which means the cadence at which you upload clean lists to your platforms depends on how frequently your data changes. But here’s a good rule of thumb is that the older the data, the less effective it’s going to be. While uploading new lists monthly may be too frequent for some, not updating your lists for a year or more renders the data useless for finding new lookalike audiences.

For example, your destination may be a popular place for youth sports tournaments. Uploading an updated email list of people who recently downloaded your visitors guide can help platforms identify an emerging segment of parents from out of town looking to make the most of their visit when their kids aren’t on the field. This may be a new audience segment you’ve been missing that you can now connect with since families may extend their stay beyond game times.

Uploading fresh lookalike lists can also reveal new seasonal audience segments to target. Your updated data may show more winter visitors this year compared to previous seasons. These guests likely have different interests and needs than your summer visitors. Knowing this can better equip you to retarget and market to each seasonal segment using the right messaging and creative that resonates with them.

Be Quick to Capitalize on Current Social Trends

Social media scrollers and pop culture junkies, it’s your time to shine: Current trends, cultural moments, and viral memes are all great fodder for new content. This takes a nimble team to pull off well, but creatively capitalizing on what’s buzzing keeps your brand fresh and relevant. (And hey, it’s fun, too!)

Keep your mind open for making connections with what’s going on and how your brand could add its voice. You could spoof a viral video with your front office staff. Commemorate National fill-in-the-blank Day by creating a list of the best places for fill-in-the-blank in your area. Celebrate a hometown hero who just broke a record. Whatever you do, prepare to be nimble and willing to pivot your existing content strategy. And most importantly, stay authentic to your brand.

In some instances, there are cultural phenomena you can plan for. In the summer of 2023, we embraced the hype around the Barbie movie being released, recalling fondly the time we got her to commemorate her 60th birthday with an Arizona bucket list road trip. Next up, we’re hoping to celebrate Smokey the Bear’s birthday by highlighting our work on fire safety campaigns as it relates to sustainability and responsible recreation. Need some inspiration? @nationalparkservice consistently hits it out of the, well…park.

Combat Creative and Messaging Fatigue By Making Small Changes

Good marketers know people have to see the same message a large number of times before making a decision. And while there’s a good tolerance among consumers for seeing the same ad multiple times, creative fatigue is real. Keep your pulse on how frequent you’re running creative iterations (message, image or both) and swap them out every four to six weeks.

If you balked at that last part, don’t worry. We don’t mean scrap the whole thing and start over. We mean make small tweaks to what you already have at your disposal. There are many different ways to get this done.

• Tweak the color, messaging, or CTA button on a banner ad
• Change up the CTA language on your booking page
• AB test different versions of paid ads with the same image but different headline
• Change up personalizing and not personalizing email subjects
• Crop an image to focus on something else
• Iterate on your top performing creative with by changing the focus of the subject

The key to doing this well is to set a calendar reminder to make the swap, and keep track of what’s performing well and what isn’t. That way, you know what to optimize for the next campaign.

Keeping your brand’s marketing strategy fresh, alive, and thriving doesn’t have to require an overhaul of your go-to strategies. By incorporating these techniques, you’ll be able to stretch your efforts, learn how to make your tourism marketing even more effective, and let your audience know you’re more than ready for their visit.