Congratulations! You took the first step toward enhancing your tourism development strategy by conducting a tourism market analysis.
Now what’s next?
If your study sits on a shelf collecting dust, then it wasn’t an effective use of your time or resources. It doesn’t matter how many interesting things you learned about who your tourists are or where they come from. Insight without action is pointless.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about one of the most effective ways you can dust off your tourism market analysis and put it into use: targeted marketing campaigns.
Applying a Tourism Market Analysis to Marketing Campaigns
One of the goals of a consumer-focused tourism analysis is to tell you who is visiting your community. This yields a gold mine of helpful information on everything from what types of media channels your visitors prefer to their shopping and dining preferences.
This information is extremely valuable in creating marketing campaigns. Your marketing staff or agency can use the insights to come up with advertising ideas that will resonate with your target audience.
But the information can be used for more than just campaign development. It can also be used to shape campaign targeting.
Here are three ways you can apply your tourism market analysis to your campaign execution strategy.
Approach #1: Identify Mass Media Channels That Fit Your Target Audience
Perhaps the most common advertising approach is to identify mass media channels with audiences most similar to your target audience segments. Your tourism market analysis can be helpful in this area, as it provides a definition of the types of consumers you are seeking and may even list the mass media channels they tend to prefer. Using these channels comes with a couple of drawbacks though. You are reliant on the channel for information on the consumers they attract. You also are unlikely to find a channel that’s a perfect fit, which means you’ll be reaching non-likely visitors along with your likely visitors.
Approach #2: Re-create Your Visitor Profile Through Social Media Advertising Platforms
Digital advertising has ushered in a new era of advanced targeting. Social media platforms offer a range of filters that you can use to select the audience that makes the most sense for your marketing messages. If you know who you want to reach based on your tourism analysis, you can try to re-create the custom profile using the filters each platform provides. Again, you are reliant on the channel for audience segmentation options and may not be able to perfectly re-create your visitor profile. The level of granularity also varies greatly from channel to channel.
Approach #3: Use a Household-level Marketing Model to Identify Prospects for Direct Marketing
The third option builds on the basic visitor profile included in your analysis by constructing a model that can be used to score individual households based on their likelihood to visit your area. Once you have a list of your top prospects, you can work with your consumer analytics vendor to license mailing lists for targeted direct mail campaigns, deploy digital ads directly to those consumers’ devices, send targeted email campaigns, or conduct social media ad campaigns to your custom audience. If a marketing model wasn’t already included in your tourism market analysis, then this approach does come with extra costs, but the benefit is that you are able to target your marketing message at the household level and reduce wasted impressions.
The Bottom Line
Using your tourism market analysis to guide marketing strategy is a smart way to put the study’s insights into action. Rather than testing campaigns on different audiences and hoping to find one that sticks, you can reach the right households and reduce wasted advertising dollars. Traditional mass media channels and social media platforms are a good first step but consider using a custom marketing model to take your targeting down to the household level.
If your community or tourism agency needs help executing targeted marketing campaigns, Buxton can help! Explore the products and services in our tourism solution.
