Destination Marketing Podcast Episode 11: Hope Stokes
Hope Stokes: Any way that I can get some sort of data, some way that I can make more informed marketing decisions, I jump at that chance because we do have a limited budget and limited resources. I don't have the dollars to go out and do a really fun, experimental campaign. I have to f go back, look at numbers, and decide what's the best move to make. That's how we got to that point. Adam Stoker: Okay, everybody, welcome to the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker, along with my co-host Jordan Barker. Jordan Barker: Hey everybody. Adam Stoker: And we're excited to be here today. We've got a special guest that we're excited to bring on and chat a little bit with. We've got Hope Stokes and she is from Amarillo, Texas, a unique destination and we're excited to learn more about it. Hope, how you doing? Hope Stokes: I'm doing good. Happy to be here. Adam Stoker: Great. We're happy to have you. Tell me, first of all, we have a question that we ask everybody just to kind of break the ice, tell me your dream destination. As a tourism marketing podcast, we need to talk about travel. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? Hope Stokes: Probably Florence, Italy. I studied abroad when I was younger and fell in love with that city, so I'd probably go there. But the Italians don't really like to let people in to stay. Adam Stoker: Florence, Italy. I tell you, I haven't been to Italy. I would love to go to Europe. Jordan Barker: Me too. Adam Stoker: For me, Europe is on the list, but keeps getting bumped down by tropical destinations for some reason. And Alaska. I would love to explore Europe someday, and especially Italy as a part of that. Jordan Barker: Hope, is there anywhere that you've actually been that is one of your favorite destinations? Where you keep going back to it or do you have a favorite spot? Hope Stokes: Florence is definitely one of those. I also love Barcelona a lot. I like to switch on and off each year from a tropical destination to a European destination. Jordan Barker: Well, there you go. Hope Stokes: Looking to branch out into Asia soon enough. But those two places I've actually been that I love, and I could live there, and be happy. Adam Stoker: Well, I tell you the idea of alternating between the two is pretty good. With kids it's been difficult to even do one a year. Do you have kids, Hope? Hope Stokes: I do not. My boyfriend and I, we like to travel a lot and we're being selfish while we're younger. We actually don't purchase gifts for each other at all throughout the years. We don't do Christmas, we don't do Valentine's Day or anything. We just save all of our money and go on a vacation each year, together. Jordan Barker: That's so smart. Adam Stoker: You are truly dedicated to the tourism industry? Jordan Barker: I like that, that's awesome. Hope Stokes: I am, yes. When I found that I could do it for a living, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this was meant to be." Adam Stoker: Well, tell me a little bit about that. Tell me about you getting into tourism, what brought you to the industry, and what it's been like so far. Hope Stokes: Yeah, it's actually really interesting. I wanted to be a dentist my entire life growing up. That's what I thought I was going to do. I ended up graduating a little bit early from high school and my final project was to head up and finish up this app that different students had been working on throughout the years. The app was basically called, “Amarillo: Where to Eat, Sleep and Play.” It was an itinerary building app for Amarillo. Once it got published, I believe it was the first, fully, student-developed app to get published on the Google Play Store and the Apple Store. When that got published, the Convention and Visitor Council here got ahold of me and said, "You know what you did is what we do for a living." So I interned and then the rest is history. Adam Stoker: Wow. So how long ago was that, if you don't mind me asking? How long have you been in the tourism space? Jordan Barker: Is this an indirect age question? Adam Stoker: No, no. Jordan Barker: She started young. She mentioned high school. So yeah, she's not going to give away anything that she shouldn't. Hope Stokes: No, that's fine. I'm still at an age where I don't mind sharing my age. It's been six years. I actually started my professional career before I started college. It's very interesting that I have more professional experience than I do student experiences. It's a little backwards. Adam Stoker: Well, we see a lot of transitions from dentist to tourism — Jordan Barker: It's a pretty common career path. Adam Stoker: A natural path for you. Jordan Barker: Yeah, pretty common. Hope Stokes: Right. Oh course, exactly. Jordan Barker: Tell us a little bit about your destination itself. If there's people that are listening that might not be as familiar with Amarillo, can you give us an overview of some of the main attractions and we'll get into some of the challenges and things like that, but if you want to touch on your areas of focus and even some of the challenges that go along with marketing Amarillo, that would be great. Hope Stokes: Yeah. I'll start off with where we're located — Texas. We're at the panhandle. At the top of Texas, we are the only major city in Texas that route 66 runs through, so that gives you a little bit of an idea. We have the second largest canyon in the United States next to the Grand Canyon, but it is the largest drivable canyon. I like to go with that one. Adam Stoker: Okay. Hope Stokes: We're very western focused, but we are modern as well. When I explain how Amarillo is to people, I like to explain it as the real West. We don't have hokey, weird cow-town things you can do. We literally have people that go out on the ranch, make their living, work their cattle, work their horses, and then come back, put a suit on, and go to the symphony at night. We have an issue with travelers. One of our challenges is that travelers come expecting to all the hokey cow-town stuff and to be able to get down and dirty with things. But we're genuinely, truly a western city. People are doing this for a living, we don't have anything fake. There are some opportunities where you can go to different ranches and literally work with the ranchers. That's interesting. Yeah, we're a true western town, but we also have a thriving downtown, and an amazing art scene. We are a great example of how western towns in Texas have developed into what they are today. Adam Stoker: Yeah. I've learned a little bit about Amarillo, mostly because my parents actually used to live in Lubbock, Texas and their favorite kind of stay-cation, if you want to call it that, was in Amarillo. They would go to Amarillo, actually, there's a steak house there that they just love. They went several times during the time that they lived in Lubbock. I would always hear about their vacations and it sounds like a great destination. Texas is huge, everything is six hours away in Texas if you're driving. Right? Hope Stokes: Absolutely. Adam Stoker: It's somewhat kind of isolated, as far as Amarillo goes, but you get people that come from a lot of different areas of both the country and outside of the country. Tell us a little bit about the main geographic locations that people come from to vacation in Amarillo. Hope Stokes: Yeah. Our biggest target is actually the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It's funny, Texas is so huge, a lot of our audience, a lot of our visitors are straight up from Texas itself. We have quite a few Californians that come through, some from New Mexico, or Colorado. But our biggest audience is from Dallas/Fort Worth. And then you start getting into San Antonio, and Austin, and places like that. Adam Stoker: Interesting. Does the state of Texas have a co-op program where they do matching dollar for dollar of some sort to augment your advertising activities? Hope Stokes: No, they do not. In Texas we have issues with tourism funding. It got taken away for a little bit, but during this session they got all their funding back. Currently we don't have anything where the state will match your dollars or anything like that. Adam Stoker: Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. We ask people that question because here in Utah they have a matching program where they really try to augment the out-of-state dollars. So if the destination is advertising out-of-state, and let's call it southern California for example, the state will match those dollar for dollar. It's always interesting when somebody has most of their visitor traffic coming from in state. I like to ask the co-op question because "It's a tough decision. Do I take the dollar for dollar match or do I market to my largest audience that's here in state?" Hope Stokes: Right. Yeah, that would be nice. I would love that. Let's call the governor and make that happen. Jordan Barker: Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Adam Stoker: We've got a couple of tactical questions for you, but just so that our listeners can understand the situation you're in, tell us a little bit about the structure of your team within your office. Hope Stokes: Right. There are 10 people on the CVC side. We have a marketing department, a tourism department, a sales department, a servicing department, and then administration. Within my department, it is me and a lucky part-timer, which is typically an intern. They rotate in and out. I am a-lot-of-times a one-man show except for every four months I get a new intern, which is always fun. Then, our servicing is two people, our sales is two people, and tourism is three people. Dan Quandt is our vice president. Yeah, that's a little bit on how we're structured. Jordan Barker: Nice. It's interesting, we talked to CVBs, or I guess in your case it's a council, but we talk to CVBs and destinations of all different shapes and sizes. I think one of the things that a lot of the individuals that we speak with, they're in similar situations where they have to be really scrappy. They've got a small team, they don't have a ton of resources, and so that's one thing that we want to dive a little bit deeper into today. Specifically, when it comes to tracking effectiveness of your marketing dollars. Typically, you go to trade shows, you go to tourism events, and you hear about different attribution platforms or different marketing technologies that will help track the effectiveness of your dollars. A lot of times those are a little out of reach for some of the smaller destinations. I want to dive a little bit deeper. I know that you're currently using ADARA. For those that might be listening to the podcast that don't understand why a destination would be using ADARA, do you mind giving us a little background on how you're currently using the platform, and how it helps inform your marketing decisions, and we can go from there? Hope Stokes: Yeah, absolutely. ADARA generates ADARA pixels and I connect them to every single ad that I have. Basically, ADARA uses first party data to track when an ad has been delivered, to collect an audience basically. Then, when an ad has been delivered to that audience, they track that pixel to the point where they come in market. They have a lot of partnerships with loyalty programs, airlines, things like that. When someone comes in and they're on that loyalty program, they'll get counted as a visitor in Amarillo. There's always been a challenge in the tourism industry with how to prove your marketing is actually working. This is a way I can go to the board and say, "Hey, this person looked at this ad, and then they came into market 14 days later, and they're valued at this much," because we put a dollar amount on different people. So, we can get an idea of how well our marketing's working. Of course, you have to take that with a bit of a grain of salt because it is possible that someone viewed that ad and came into market, but they were already planning to come here, and the ad didn't do it. But still, just the fact that you can prove that, "Hey, these 20 people looked at our ad and then they came into market," and you show that to your board. It makes them a lot happier than me saying, "Hey, we did this ad program or this marketing campaign, and I think it works because more people came. But I can't really prove that it was that campaign." It kind of fills that gap that a lot of people have trouble with. Jordan Barker: That makes a lot of sense. Again, one of the big challenges, and you hit on it, in tourism, is you have the DMO or the CVB that's actually running and spending marketing dollars, or running the marketing campaigns and then you have the hotels and the local businesses that are actually collecting that revenue. You've got this giant gap in trying to report back on marketing spend effectiveness. Like you mentioned, ADARA, great solution. We've talked about Arrivalist on the program and others. Tell me a little bit about what ultimately led you to the decision that it was time for us, or was this solution already in place when you got to the office? Or was this something that you decided, “It's time that we level up our sophistication a little bit. We need better tracking, better visibility.” Hope Stokes: Yeah, no. That was a joint decision between Dan and I. Dan will help me a lot in the marketing area and- Adam Stoker: And who's Dan, just so that we help our listeners on that. Hope Stokes: Yeah. Dan Quandt is the vice president of the CVB. He oversees the entire CVB. We both have this obsession with data, so anytime we do anything, we want to make an informed decision. It's never a good idea in marketing to be like, "I like this. This is pretty, this is good, let's do it." You need to have some sort of data backing it up. Once ADARA came around, they got ahold of us, we were like, "Oh my gosh, we'd been looking for a way to attribute visitors from our ads." It made a lot of sense. Any way that I can get some sort of data, some way I can make more informed marketing decisions, I jump at that chance because we do have a limited budget and limited resources. I don't have the dollars to go out and do a really fun experimental campaign. I have to go back, and look at numbers, and decide what's the best move to make. That's how we got to that point. Adam Stoker: Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point that with a limited budget, every dollar is valuable. I love the fact that you're using ADARA. One of the balances that I think a lot of our listeners are struggling with is, "I don't have a lot of money. Some of these software tools or technologies that are available in the industry are either cost prohibitive, or very expensive, or a large portion of my budget." How do you decide, for example, I know ADARA is actually a fairly expensive software tool, but if you look at the ability to track the results, maybe it's not that expensive. How do you balance the cost of a tool like ADARA with the size of your budget? I think that would be really good for a lot of our listeners to understand. Hope Stokes: Yeah. I definitely understand why that makes people nervous because you're right. These types of software are pretty pricey, and it can be intimidating to sign that dotted line, to make the leap towards going more in that direction. But really, for me it was pretty easy because now with ADARA I can make better, informed decisions. Even though I'm not putting as much money into straight marketing itself, the money I am putting towards that marketing has more value because I know that it's working, I can prove to my board. That’s also a huge selling point. A lot of people in CVBs have issues with their boards not even understanding what they do fully and totally, much less understanding how they're producing results. This is a very clear way to show your board it's working, or help you decide if you tweak a campaign, or different things like that. I think it's definitely worth putting more money towards data and programs like ADARA so that even though you're taking away from your marketing, you're actually optimizing it and making that money worth more. Does that make sense? Adam Stoker: Great point. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. For some of our listeners, I'm going to ask you a question that could probably be perceived as maybe a little bit invasive, but remember we're trying to help our listeners understand a way forward. Do you have a specific percentage of your budget that you spend on technology tools? Have you designated it that way or how do you calculate what that breaking point is of whether or not I can purchase a technology tool for our destination? Hope Stokes: Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say we're probably sitting, and this is a rough estimate, we're probably sitting about 35-40% just in tracking and data collection. Pretty much we will look at it and see, "Is there a way we can get this for free?" Thank God for Google Analytics because they just give you so much that they don't have to, but they're kind to do that. If we see an area where we think we have a blind spot that we're not collecting information on, we fill it. Period. Because we feel that if we can have more information from that area we can optimize it in our marketing campaigns. We're really big on sacrificing some marketing dollars for some additional data collection software because like I said, it just really stretches that marketing dollar even further. Jordan Barker: Yeah, I really like that. I think sometimes as a marketer you want to do things and you want to move quickly. I think sometimes the challenge with that mentality is, "We want to allocate a large chunk of our budget, and rightfully so, to doing things that will help drive additional visitation." I think that makes a lot of sense. I love hearing that it's also that balance of trying to figure out, "How do we make sure that we have a good framework where we can actually report on the effectiveness of our marketing dollars?" I really like that. Along those lines, I want to ask you a question though. There's some listeners that wear multiple hats and I'm sure that you can probably relate to this too. If you're not super comfortable with data, sometimes the thought of having a platform like ADARA might be a bit intimidating. Can you talk to maybe the level of sophistication that a destination marketer needs to have in order for them to be able to understand the data? Is it fairly intuitive once you get into the platform, maybe you can speak to that? Hope Stokes: Yeah, great question. I can see how it can be intimidating, but once you get in the platform, it's very intuitive. It's broken down very simply. You have your dashboard that’s very straight forward. You also have an account manager that will help explain things or break things down for you if you need it. But honestly, they've done a really good job of easily laying the dashboard out. One of my favorite things about ADARA is I get to seem a lot smarter than I am because it seems like, "I'm going to go get all these pixels and develop all these pixels," when literally all I do is put a name, the pixel, and push “Generate,” and copy, paste, and attach it to the ad. It's not a long, intense process at all. You talk about attaching pixels to things and I think people's minds explode when they really shouldn't. It is literally a click of a button just to generate it and then copy and paste it, and you can send it to your agency or do it yourself. It's fairly simple, very user friendly. Adam Stoker: Awesome. So you don't have to be a web developer to use that technology, right? Hope Stokes: Yeah, absolutely not. Adam Stoker: Hope, you've mentioned ADARA and you've talked about the way that helps drive your decision making within your destination. I really appreciate you talking about it because for a lot of small destinations, I think a ADARA is a little bit intimidating. Great to hear that a small destination is still able to leverage it and also willing to make that investment because of the importance of the data that you get. Are there any other technology tools that you're using within your destination that are helping you make your decisions in a better way that might benefit our listeners from hearing? Hope Stokes: Yeah, there definitely are. One of the bigger ones that we work with as well is Meltwater. They're wonderful. Adam Stoker: Oh, yeah. Hope Stokes: Yeah. They have a ton of different tools that they offer. We do a lot of media listening, just for a media alerts. Anytime someone talks about Amarillo or mentions us, we get alerts for that. I also do a lot of our email marketing through Meltwater, strictly because the data that they give you back on it is amazing and pretty in depth. I can keep a track of, "Hey, maybe this email worked better than the other," and things like that. Adam Stoker: Tell me a little more about that because I don't think there's a lot of destinations that use Meltwater that necessarily leverage it for their email campaigns. I'd love to hear more about that. Hope Stokes: Yeah. I use it for smaller campaigns. The level where I'm at, essentially I can only send to a thousand people a day, which is pretty small. Our main primary newsletters go out through different services. I really use it if I'm speaking to the media, so anytime I send out a release, I will track that. Or if I have a smaller group of people that's under a thousand, obviously, I'll send that out. But you can see pretty basic things like click-through rate, open rate, different things like that. But it will also show you how much time they spent on it. It gives you generic things, but then it also just dives a little bit deeper into it. And I compare, so I'll only send similar emails out. I'll make a small tweak to one and I'll compare the numbers, and if that update worked then I'll keep using that. I'm almost A/B testing using it with email. Adam Stoker: Yeah. Hope Stokes: Which is an interesting tactic, but it's really worked and I've kind of got it down to a fine science of what different audiences like in emails. It's really interesting. I wish that I could bump it up one more notch and make it my primary emailing system. But the other products I see a little bit more value in, so I kind of stick to the basic with that. Adam Stoker: Hope, I think there's a lot of destinations that are listening are like you, they may have a limited budget, a smaller budget, are scrappy and trying to use things in different ways that benefit the destination. Is there any advice, or any suggestion, or anything else that you're using that you feel like would benefit our audience? What have you seen that you feel like could benefit small destinations? Hope Stokes: Yeah. Like you mentioned previously, when you start getting into bigger data software, they do get very pricey. My first thing I would say is if you can make it happen, make it happen. Just take that leap, cut a little bit out of your direct spending and spend it on data. I think it's definitely worth it. Just take full advantage of the free data you get. People don't do that enough. Go into Google Analytics, really dive in there, see what you can do. You can create your own pixels, you can start tracking conversions. Watch some webinars and learn how to use the parts of that software you're intimidated by. Even with social media, they all allow you a certain amount of data and different things like that. Dive into those platforms, look at the dashboards, start tracking it, look through trends, and different things like that. It does become overwhelming very quickly when you look at data, but I think a good start is to utilize the free data that you have available to you. A lot of times people aren't even aware of it. Just a simple Google search will pull up a lot of things that you can be using. Definitely, the biggest one is Google Analytics. Don't just click on that audience tab, dive in a little bit deeper past that point and you'll find a lot of gems in there that you didn't know about. Adam Stoker: Great advice. Thank you, Hope. Jordan, is it safe to say that this is probably one of your favorite episodes ever since we're talking data and analytics? Jordan Barker: Well look, on the last podcast that you and I did you were calling me out for being a nerd. Is this you baiting me? Is that what this is? Adam Stoker: I don't want to be the one that says it every time. Jordan Barker: Okay. That's fair. Yeah, and I think we're big fans of data here at Relic. Love to hear how people are using data, how they're consuming data, and how they're actioning data. Yeah, I actually really enjoyed the conversation today, so thanks so much for that, Hope. I really appreciate it. Hope Stokes: Yeah, absolutely. I love talking about data anytime I can. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm a nerd too. Jordan Barker: Yes. Adam Stoker: Awesome. Well Hope, it's been great to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hope Stokes: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Adam Stoker: This has been the Destination Marketing Podcast with Adam Stoker and Jordan Barker. We want to remind all of our listeners to go check out the LinkedIn group, Destination Marketers on LinkedIn, and we've also just created the Facebook group Destination Marketers on Facebook. Join each of those forums — that's where we're sharing information. We're growing together as a group. We've got a lot of people asking questions, and eventually we want to get to the point where we source the topics of these podcast episodes from those groups, from those conversations. Come, share what you've learned, ask for help, and let's all help each other get better together as marketers. Thanks again everybody, and we'll talk to you soon.
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