Doing More With Less - Part 4

Marketers of destinations, attractions and resorts are still dealing with the anxiety and challenges brought on by the financial crisis of 2008-09. Forced to do their 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. According to a recent issue of the Wanderlust Report, one of the best antidotes to this downturn is to generate some positive marketing results. The online newsletter presented five important ideas to help your destination or attraction deal with a down economy, and make leaps when everyone else is crawling.

Tip #4: Track Your Efforts Better

“With tools like Google Analytics, CRM systems, email tracking, and other common tracking tools, you can follow basic best-practices and develop your very own set of core metrics, conversion statistics, and KPIs,” said Patrick Reilly, EVP Planning and Research at Wanderlust. “This can help you understand where your marketing and advertising is working, and where it isn’t. This leads to less waste.”

It’s getting harder to make excuses for NOT having good tracking in place, but it really helps weed out legacy “must buy” media vehicles or events that just don’t deliver. We’ve had experiences where we’ve been able to change the trajectory of a destination’s annual visitation and revenue from down 10% to up 20% (yes, a 30% swing) in one year, without spending any more money.

Perhaps most important is finding the right mix of analytics and tracking to truly understand which marketing approaches are delivering positive results, and which aren’t. Building a best-practice oriented strategy where the bankable returns can be balanced by less easy-to-measure initiatives gives marketing directors a solid, defensible approach.

There are hurdles to tracking, to be sure. Many marketers skew towards the creative end of the spectrum, while some tend to be strategy people, and others lean toward strengths in organization and managing. These people might not be excited by metrics, measurement, and other IT related issues, but this is all fine. Not everyone needs to be hip deep in numbers all the time. Just recognize that ‘trackable’ means profitable, and it leads to better results.

Get some help from a marketing technology expert (or borrow someone from IT and develop your own in-house), and create a “dashboard” of data that you can refer to when you need it. Reilly adds, “You’d be shocked to see how different your approach to marketing becomes once you integrate real, live data to the picture. Making tough spending decisions also gets easier when you know you’re not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

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: [email protected]