Tips to help destinations and attractions deal with a down economy

Wanderlust;
It’s been well over a year since the financial crisis hit, with millions of jobs lost and businesses making cutbacks in people, capital investment, and especially advertising. Talk of depression permeated budget and management meetings, as marketers shook in their boots. We know that destinations, attractions, resorts, and other tourism-related marketers face an even more acute version of this anxiety as we see statistic after statistic roll in marking the decreases in our businesses.

Perhaps the single best antidote to this anxiety, according to a recent issue of the Wanderlust Report, is to generate some marketing successes, some positive results to offset the gloom and doom.

“Knowing that a dollar invested in smart marketing will deliver a bankable return in business is key to making it through the valley and setting your sights on the next peak,” said Patrick Reilly, EVP Planning and Research at Wanderlust. “As we endure doing our jobs with less – less media spend, less help from staffing, less time – it’s a good time to shore up the foundations of our marketing programs, and create some stability for ourselves.”

Here are five important ideas that will help your destination or attraction deal with a down economy, and make leaps when everyone else is crawling.

Five Keys to Doing More With Less:

         1.         Think quality over quantity

         2.         Know who you’re dealing with

         3.         Get your message right

         4.         Track your efforts better

         5.         Pick your tactics wisely

Tip #1: Think quality over quantity

For most travel-related businesses, it’s fairly clear that you can’t be all things to all people,and that certain consumer segments deliver a greater proportion of your business than others. Combining this fact with the scarcity of mass media dollars formerly used to blanket your message over wide swaths of the marketplace, it’s imperative to think about the quality of your positioning and your message. Simply put, you probably can’t afford quantity, so you better optimize the quality.

If you have the luxury of a real media spend, you better know that it’s well targeted, and reaching the audience you know will buy. The C-suite isn’t likely to have much patience for marketing strategies that haven’t embraced the realities of our current economic climate.

To notch up the quality, reengineer your thinking to get intensely focused on sending the perfect message, to the perfect consumer segments. This works better than mass media efforts, shows more return, and requires far fewer resources. It’s not as easy as simply buying GRPs, and requires some deeper thinking and tougher planning, but makes much more sense strategically.

Read more of 5 Keys to Doing More With Less in the Wanderlust Report, Volume 2, Number 2.

About Wanderlust

Wanderlust provides marketing and branding expertise to destinations, resorts and tourism attractions. We uncover what drives people to choose where they go and build integrated marketing programs to attract them — using the internet, social networks, direct marketing and mass media.

Contact: Mark Shipley

Phone: 518-272-2500

Email:  mshipley@createwanderlust.com