Transcript:
Adam Stoker: [00:00:00] And I think it's more important than ever to take the steps now to play the long game instead of the transactional game of just, let's run an ad and get ahead in the bed. Let's build a loyal following, a loyal audience that's going to stick with us for years to come.
[00:00:20] Hello everyone and welcome to a special New Year's Resolution episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. This has become a really fun tradition that I try to do every year on the show. I did it the first year and didn't think much of it, then went back and looked at the numbers and man, it appears that the audience actually enjoyed that episode because it had a pretty high listenership and then we did it again in year two and sure enough, same thing. Right?
[00:00:50] So it's become an annual tradition, something that I think our listeners have started to expect and something that I've really enjoyed preparing for and putting together. I definitely, definitely have some New Year's Resolutions for tourism destinations in 2023 I'm going to be talking about today a blind spot that I've seen in the industry that I feel like needs to be addressed by every destination in the country and in the world for that matter. If you're a destination and you're listening to this episode, I think you'll find some of the conversation today really interesting.
[00:01:26] To start that conversation, I think it's really important that we acknowledge where we are in the economic climate. I've heard some people say, hey, we're not in a recession. I've heard some people say, everything is about to turn around. But I would say for the most part, every indication that I can see publicly is that the economy has changed significantly from where it was a year ago. A year ago, interest rates were at almost zero and everybody was able to get way more house than they could get for their primary or than they had been able to get in the past for their primary residence because of interest rates. Then all of the sudden it's come to a screeching halt. The housing market is changing significantly. Usually when the housing market changes, what that results in is the economy as a whole experiences a major change.
[00:02:20] I think we're seeing the same thing. I've seen a lot of organizations have to go through layoffs and reduction of forces. We are no different. We've even gone through a reduction of force. I think the main thing for that is that organizations are realizing that they need to prioritize immediate revenue in order to be able to weather the storm. I see the travel industry being affected as well by that. I think there's going to be fewer people with the disposable income to travel. I think there's going to be a lot of similarities to what we experienced in 2008.
[00:03:00] I think, first of all, what I would say is if I'm working in a tourism destination, I am doing everything I can to demonstrate my value. When I say demonstrate your value, I mean even as an individual within your organization, that goes all the way to the DMO demonstrating its value within the community and then of course value as a whole.
[00:03:25] I think step one is make sure that you are demonstrating your value at an individual level. When I went through the recession in 2008 and 2009, I graduated from BYU at a time that may have been the worst time to enter the advertising industry in the last 30 years because nobody was hiring, agencies had been going through layoffs. and it was a really, really challenging time. I searched for months trying to find an opportunity, I had experience, I had done internships and I had a degree from a really good school and I still had a really difficult time finding a job in advertising.
[00:04:09] And after searching for a very long time, I was finally able to land an internship for $10 an hour at Thomas Arts in Farmington that’s an advertising agency here in Utah. I got some incredible, incredible experience there. But what I realized early on is if I wanted to keep that job, I was going to have to really demonstrate my value. I made sure that I was the first one there. I made sure that I was the last one to leave and I made sure that there was never anything that fell through the cracks that was supposed to be on my plate. It was a really interesting time to enter the workforce and I feel like the value for me to enter the workforce at a time of desperation was incredible because what it meant was I knew that there was 10 other people waiting for that job if I didn't do a good enough job. So I knew that I had to do the very, very best I could.
[00:05:02] Well, I think the economy is getting to a point where we all need to make sure that if we want to keep our jobs, we have got to add as much value as possible. It's not just adding the value, it's demonstrating that value and making sure that your leaders are aware of the value you're bringing and trying to have a major impact on the organization. If you're a DMO and suddenly tax revenues are down and suddenly the economy has changed, your budget is going to be scrutinized. You're going to have politicians looking at the amount of money that's dedicated to tourism and they're going to be saying, “Well what if we cut that line item that would save us a lot of money because they're uneducated on the nature of those funds that come through the lodging tax.”
[00:05:51] So again, if you're a DMO, there has never been a better time to make sure that you've got the mechanisms in place to demonstrate and report your value to the community, to your political stakeholders, and to the business stakeholders in your destination. So step one going into a difficult economy, it's never been more important to demonstrate your value both at the individual level and as a DMO. So let's start there.
[00:06:17] Second of all, I have really noticed over the last several years that destinations, especially with COVID, I want to talk about COVID a little bit. I did an episode with Camden Burnett from my organization, still a member of my organization. A couple of years ago and it was during COVID and we did an analysis of our client’s web traffic after COVID when people weren't traveling yet but were kind of gearing up to travel. What we found is that destinations that had built a memorable and solid brand we're actually getting more web traffic than those that hadn't done a lot of work in branding. Now that might seem like a no-brainer, it might seem obvious to some of you listening, but so many destinations have ignored brand in exchange for immediate returns.
[00:07:14] So the heads and beds philosophy of the way we're going to measure everything is whether or not we're getting heads and beds, I think that philosophy has a very short-term outlook and doesn't really take care of the long-term for a destination. And so again, I think it's really, really important to take a look at your brand and make sure that you've done the work on your brand that in a challenging economy people are going to remember you that you're going to be top of mind because now you're competing with more destinations for that same traveler than you ever have before.
[00:07:49] One thing I want to make sure of is that everyone has prepared their brand for a difficult economy. If you haven't done that work, the work that I would do right now is focus on building your brand. Remember from my book, Touchpoints which you can find on Amazon, I think we've sold a dozen copies, just kidding, we've sold a few more than that. But it's on Amazon, it's called Touchpoints and it's the destination marketer's guide to brand evaluation and enhancement. In that book, I talk about how your brand is the sum of all the touchpoints your organization has with the outside world. So what are your touchpoints? We're not going to go, this isn't going to be an entire discussion of my book today, But I think it's really important that you are looking at all the different touchpoints your organization has with the outside world and making sure that those touch points are having a positive impact on your brand as opposed to detracting from the perception of your brand.
[00:08:44] So that's number one, is make sure that your brand is in order. Now, the way to do that as far as doing it intentionally as a marketer is yes, we can look at all the touchpoints but let's talk about marketing strategy as a whole. I see that destinations are doing a really, really good job with two of the three major types of media in the industry. The first one is earned media. I think destinations do a really good job of PR, they understand the value of PR. They are either using very competent agencies to handle their PR or they've built a PR team in-house. They're bringing in travel writers and hosting travel writers and getting those travel writers to write about them. Again, earned media is when you earn the placement as opposed to paying for the placement to someone else's audience. So I think that is a concept that destinations understand very well. And for the most part, do a pretty good job of. So that is one-third as a marketer of what you need to do and make sure is going well in order to build your brand.
[00:09:51] The second thing that you need to do is make sure that you are getting your message out to as many people as possible and that in a lot of cases is through paid media. So paid media is when you're actually utilizing a platform or a publication that has already done the legwork to build an audience and you're renting access to that audience through advertising, whether that's placing banner ads on a website, whether that's placing ads on TV, or whether that's billboards outdoor, all of that kind of stuff that's paid media, you are renting access to someone else's audience. And of course, as the owner of an ad agency, of course, paid media, I see a major importance for paid media. Those two places are where I feel like destinations are doing a pretty good job. We're leveraging paid and earned media really well.
[00:10:48] The place where I feel like there is a major blind spot for the industry as a whole, is owned media. It's fascinating to me because I feel like from a branding standpoint the place where you can probably have the largest impact right now is through owned media. Now, what do I mean by owned media? Well, for example, when I talked about with paid media, you're renting access to someone else's audience. Well, that's someone else, whether it be Facebook or whether it be the website that has a bunch of traffic or whatever, they've spent years and years building up an audience so that you will then pay for access to it. Right?
[00:11:32] Well, I believe that destinations also need to be building their own audiences and the way that you do that is through your own media channels. So for example, a couple of owned media channels that I feel like destinations are not taking advantage of enough, one is email. Email is amazing because once if you think about how difficult it is for the destination to measure the effectiveness of their advertising because the destination runs the ads and the hotels collect the revenue. It's very difficult to build that bridge. I know that there's data resources out there, like Arrivalist like Zartico and several others that have popped up that helped build that bridge, but it's definitely not perfect. But the thing about email marketing automation is once you actually have someone's email in your system, you now have permission to market to that person and to continue to send them messaging and if they're in your CRM and you're using a good CRM, you can actually track their progress over time and evaluate if they actually made a visit to the destination.
[00:12:38] So email is a great tool. You’ve heard me talk about on this show, I mean obviously, you're listening right now to a podcast, right? I think podcasts are a very underutilized method of owned media and audience building. And what's fascinating about that is we went from just a couple of podcasts that we were helping tourism destinations with at the beginning of 2022 and now we're approaching 20 podcasts that we manage and we have probably another dozen in the pipeline that we're probably going to go have go live in the next few months. This idea of podcasting for tourism destinations has really caught and I got to be honest, it is fun to say that I had a major impact on that in podcast role in the tourism industry.
[00:13:27] Now we definitely haven't been the only ones. In fact, I always like to call out my friend Kristen who's at Long Island, she's created the show Long Island Iced Tea, which has become much more than just a podcast. I chatted with her just as she was getting that going and I think she's done an incredible job. I think there are several other destinations that have done a good job as well creating podcasts and owned media. But it's been really, really fun to facilitate destinations who would have never before thought to create a podcast, and now they have really solid podcasts that are engaging the community that are building audiences and having a lot of success. So that's been a really, really rewarding part of 2022 for me.
[00:14:09] Website content and this is something that I feel like so many people will build their website and then they just leave it. And then seven years later they're like, oh crap, I guess it's time to revamp our website and then they'll go through that. A website needs to be a living breathing thing that continues to get updated, that continues to evolve with our audience and that's an owned media channel that isn't really being utilized because we use more of a set-it-and-forget-it strategy as kind of the industry standard and I'd like to see that change.
[00:14:39] Social media channels, text messaging is another one. If you can get a text list it’s very similar to email. I think there's so many more. I mean for example, we work with one tourism destination that's doing a Netflix series and I've talked to a few other ones that are doing major YouTube channels and things like that. There's so many different pieces of owned media that are being underutilized and I want to talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
[00:15:05] Now, as far as the benefits, you actually own the audience. If you listen to Nathanael Saldaña’s episode, I had him on a couple of weeks ago and he talked about how important it is to be able to actually control the message that's going out on your owned media channels. He's built a team to be able to do that and they're really focused on audience-building as well. The value of audience is increasing, we're going to talk about that a little bit because I don't know if the industry has really caught the vision for where things are going. I want to try to illustrate that for you today. Then I think it allows you to future proof against whether it's other platforms changing their terms, Google changes the algorithm all the time, right? There's so many things that are out of your control if you don't own the audience, but if you've built an audience, you get the message to them in your way. So I think that's a critical thing to understand.
[00:15:59] As far as owned media goes, I think one of the things that's really important is making sure that you understand the difference in the marketing funnel. Now, my good friend Stuart Butler from Myrtle Beach and I had a healthy discussion over whether we should be using the term funnel to talk about owned media, and I'll illustrate that in a moment. But let's just first of all let's take a step back and say, as we talk about marketing in general, especially through paid media, how do we look at it? Well, we start with awareness, right? If they don't know who you are, they can't book a trip to your destination.
[00:16:32] Then there's consideration, where they're evaluating your destination versus other destinations and trying to decide which one to book a trip to. Then of course there's the purchase phase when they actually book their trip. Right? So we, as marketers, we try to guide visitors through the funnel. First, make them aware of us, then have them consider us versus other destinations and then ultimately book a trip to our destination. So awareness, consideration and purchase.
[00:16:57] I believe the owned media marketing funnel is a little bit different. When I say that what I mean is I believe that the actions that you need to take to get a visit are different because with owned media you're playing the long game. If you start a podcast today or a YouTube channel or yada, yada, yada, like I've mentioned, you're not going to actually see that visitor for quite some time. Right? And so because you're playing the long game, your strategy has to be a little bit different.
[00:17:28] So what we actually do, the way I look at the owned media marketing funnel is I look at as first of all it's still awareness, awareness is step one. If they've never heard your content, if they never engaged with your- or if they've never found your content, of course, they can't consume it. Right? So step one is awareness. How do you make them aware of your content? Number two is engagement. How do you get them to engage with your content? I think there's a couple of examples of what engagement is. So for example, if they're engaging with your content in most cases maybe they're sharing it, maybe they're downloading it, or subscribing to it on your podcast platform. Maybe they are commenting on an article or something like that on one of your own media channels. Maybe they're clicking on an email, whatever it is you need to generate some sort of engagement. I would consider even a listen as an engagement. But if they are not consuming your content and engaging with that content, you really don't necessarily have access to them just yet.
[00:18:32] Now, step three. This is where Stuart and I had kind of a fun conversation about what we should call step three. I started out thinking that, that really what we're looking for is permission, because what I mean by permission is you can collect their email or maybe their phone number for a text conversation. Basically, permission to market to them on an ongoing basis. Maybe that means they joined a LinkedIn group or maybe it means they joined a Facebook group, something that allows you to continue to engage with them. Stuart made a really good argument that some of the thing, actions that they're taking are not necessarily permission, but you still have the ability to engage. A lot of that happens on social channels especially. You don't necessarily have their contact info if they're a member of your Facebook group, but you still have the ability to get your message in front of them on a consistent basis.
[00:19:26] So instead we've changed that from permission to active community. I think active community is a pretty good definition of what this step is, because instead of just somebody who's consumed your content, they now consume it on an ongoing basis and you have more access to them than you did before. You might not necessarily have their email yet or their phone number yet but you do have the ability to continuously get your message in front of them. So, active community is what I look at as the third phase in the owned media marketing funnel.
[00:19:59] And then of course there's inspiration. This is where we really try to convert them from a podcast listener or from a YouTube subscriber or from the different places where they might consume your content. We really would like to get them into either your text messaging platform and have their number to be able to continue to message to them. Although I don't think text messaging is a long-term sustainable method of engaging because I think you will end up with fatigue sooner or later if you send too many text messages to someone. So I think you have to be really careful with text messaging so as not to fatigue your audience.
[00:20:37] But then email. I think email is probably the most important method of generating that permission and then providing inspiration because you can actually see the way they interact with the content that you send. So for example, let's say they listen to your show about hiking in Georgia, right? Then they subscribe to your email list and you send them content about specific hikes in Georgia and they click through that and they browse the website. Now, you know that this is an avid hiker, somebody that's really interested in hiking content and you can continue to develop content that almost feels customized specifically for the user when in reality you're segmenting your database according to their interests, right?
[00:21:24] So I think that inspiration phase if you can get that either permission or active community, your content needs to then kind of focus more on inspiration to generate an actual visit. Then the final phase is you really want to look at purchase, which is the same as the marketing funnel that we talked about before. But then also advocacy, because what you may end up with owned media is you may generate an audience and have part of that audience be people that might not have the means or ability to come to your destination. But what you could create is an advocate and we all know that word of mouth is the most powerful method of generating opportunities. If you can create advocates that have never been to your destination, what a powerful tool to have out working for you in the marketplace.
[00:22:15] That's the marketing funnel as I see it for owned media. You can obviously see that there's some differences. I think it's a fascinating paradigm shift of how to look at marketing. But with destinations, you got to think that only a small percentage maybe 2 or 3% of people are in the market to book a trip at any given time. Right? So I know that in the car industry it's 2% of the market is looking for a car at any given time. Well, what do you do with that 98%? In my opinion, owned media allows you to engage with 100% of your audience if you create content that's entertainment first, destination second. That's a challenging thing to get your stakeholders to buy off on to create something that's entertainment first that can't be tied immediately to heads and beds.
[00:23:08] But if we're playing the long game and being strategic about what we're doing, let's engage the 100% of the audience because we know that while they may not be in the market today, they will be in the market sometime and most people travel once a year, right? At least once a year. That doesn't include the short vacations that are more nearby getting away for a weekend or whatever, but most people travel once a year. So if you engage that person in March and they start thinking about their trip in, I don't know, August, well, if you got them to engage with your content, you've had five months to engage that person and inspire that person to book a trip to your destination. So owned media gives you year-round access to that audience if done correctly. That's really the paradigm shift that I'm looking for in the industry.
[00:23:59] Let's talk about a couple of case studies, a couple of examples that I've seen. One of them that I think is fascinating is I'm sure many of you have seen the show Yellowstone. Yellowstone, it's not exactly the most realistic depiction of Montana, right, but it's definitely engaging. It's definitely entertaining, and it's got one of the most beautiful backdrops you'll ever see, which happens to be Montana, although parts of it were filmed in Utah too but we won't really highlight that. The thing that I think is fascinating about the show Yellowstone is that this was a complete windfall for the destination. What I mean by that is Yellowstone, it was a Hollywood production that was conceived in Hollywood and happened to be based in Montana. The difference for me here, well, first of all with Yellowstone there has been millions and millions of dollars of economic impact. So it's funny, I read an article that said that we're excluding tourism impact here. So outside of tourism, Yellowstone has brought Montana $85 million dollars of additional spending to the state, even with 100,000 of that spent on parking. Right?
[00:25:16] This is the non-tourism revenue that's been generated. We've got to be talking a couple of 100 million and I'm working on getting someone from the state of Montana on our show so that I can actually go in detail on this. So expect that hopefully as part of our 2023 lineup. If you're listening and you're from the state of Montana, I would love to have you on the show to talk about the economic impact of the show Yellowstone, on your destination.
[00:25:42] But this show has increased tourism in Montana greatly. My question is, how about what if instead of waiting for Hollywood to think up or dream up some sort of show that's going to have this kind of an impact on your destination, what if you start with telling the story and you intentionally create this media instead of waiting for Hollywood to do it? Now, I know we all don't have a Hollywood budget, we all can't go film a multimillion-dollar production like Yellowstone, but that's not the point. The point is, can we create content that's going to have a similar impact at a smaller scale through our own media channels?
[00:26:24] I think that one's really fascinating, the Yellowstone example. I think another one, and now many of you may not have expected to hear me talk about Kim Kardashian on my show. Okay? But we're going to talk about Kim Kardashian for a second. Okay? A couple of months ago, Kim Kardashian announced that she was starting a private equity fund. Now, what does that mean? She has obviously a following of millions and millions of people and those people are very, very engaged. Brands for the last several years have been coming to Kim Kardashian and saying, hey, we would like you to be a spokesperson for our product and so what she'll do is they'll pay her a lot of money and she'll go be the spokesperson for this product, and that product will then be launched and make millions of dollars. It's almost like a guaranteed win.
[00:27:16] What Kim Kardashian decided to do is bet on herself and say, how about instead of me just being an influencer and getting paid per post or whatever, how about I buy those companies before they scale through my private equity fund and then I can guarantee their success because of the audience that I'm able to distribute that product on. I think that's a brilliant, brilliant way to leverage an audience and there's several examples of that. I mean, another example that I'll throw out there, which I'm definitely not presenting a political view or opinion here. But if any of you are familiar with the Daily Wire, it's a conservative media outlet. They have a suite of podcast, I keep an eye on them because obviously they have several podcasts in their arsenal and they had an advertiser called Harry's Razors and Harry's Razors advertised for a long time on their podcasts and ended up disagreeing with some of the content that they produced or having issue with some of the content they produced. I don't know what it was and ended up pulling their advertising spend.
[00:28:17] And so Daily Wire said, well, what if instead of pulling that or instead of trying to replace that advertiser, what if we just created our own razor company? So they created a company called Jeremy's Razors. Jeremy is the CEO of Daily Wire. In the first three weeks they sold 26,000 subscriptions for razors. So all of a sudden what had originally been people paying for access to their audience, now all of a sudden they have the ability to create, launch and distribute products through the media and audiences that they've created. It's a really fascinating shift that I see happening and I see it happening anywhere where there's an audience, I'm seeing companies taking products that can essentially be commoditized and selling those products to their engaged and loyal audience as a result and being able to sustain these businesses, which is having a big impact on legacy brands because if you think about some of these legacy brands that have been around for a long time if these influencers that are building audiences are able to sell commoditized products that they own, all of a sudden it's a competition with these major brands that's never existed before. I think that's a really fascinating trend that I believe is going to continue to impact the industry as a whole.
[00:29:40] So what does this mean for tourism destinations? Tourism destinations if they do it correctly, they will be building an audience that is loyal to them and the difference is we're not selling people razors on a monthly basis and so we're not going to be selling to our audience 10, 12 times a year. But what we can do is create entertaining content for the 100% like I said, for the audience that's addressable and be able to engage that audience throughout the year, so that when they are in the market to book a trip, of course, they want to come interact with the assets that they heard on the show and maybe even hope to see-
[00:30:25] So for example, with Myrtle Beach, we're doing some really, really fun and creative stuff with Myrtle Beach South Carolina. They've got a show about the music scene in Myrtle Beach. That show they actually highlight some of the amazing live music that's in the destination. Well man, if you're a listener of that show and you're thinking about going on a trip, you're going to say, well why don't we go see some of the actual musicians that were highlighted on this show? Right?
[00:30:54] That's the power of leveraging your owned media channels and not just waiting for someone else to pick up your press release or tell your story or two to charge you an increasingly high price to run your ad. How about instead, let's go through the process and pain of building your audience and have access and control to that audience over the long term? I actually was able to speak on a panel with Stuart Butler and Melea Hames at eTourism Summit this year. In fact, you'll probably hear that episode if you haven't already. When we talked, one of the things Stewart says is he believes that every destination in the world should be shifting a portion of their marketing spend to owned media because of the value of building your own audience and that that value is going to increase over time.
[00:31:50] I definitely agree with Stuart's take on that. I'm sure you can tell at this point as an organization, we are all in on owned media. We have shifted our organization to help tourism destinations to create owned media assets and then all of the necessary tactics around distribution, audience engagement, and nurturing through to the actual conversion or advocacy part of the funnel. The reason we're going that direction is because we believe that the value of audiences is going to continue to increase. The cost of advertising is going to continue to increase. And the challenge of generating earned media is going to continue to increase. And so because of that, we believe that destinations need to be cultivating and developing audiences that aren't so transactional that don't just come once, but a loyal audience that will come year after year after year because they are consistently engaging with the content that's being created by the tourism destination.
[00:32:53] One of the things that I think is really important to note here is you're not going to be able to engage consistently by just selling the destination over and over and over and over again. Really, the shows that we're doing, we're trying to go entertainment first and then destination promotion second. By creating really entertaining and engaging content, you're going to be able to generate these opportunities to build audiences and engage those audiences over time.
[00:33:18] So for those of you that are listening in a time of economic challenges, I want to remind you that it's time to make sure that your brand is prepared to sustain an economic downturn. That when there's fewer travelers with more destinations fighting over those travelers, what are you doing to make sure that your brand stands out that you are engaging with those potential visitors in such a way that you're on the top of their list? I believe the owned media is the ticket if you start now. Another thing that I love that my friend Stuart says is, and I know that he didn't coin this, but he says that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, right? But the second best time is today.
[00:34:01] So if you haven't been working on your own media channels, you've been thinking about starting a podcast or developing episodic content of some sort, whether it be a YouTube channel or whether it be on your website or whether it be email or if you're trying to get better at your owned media channels, 2023 is the year to build your plan and start executing on it. And then of course, if any of you need help or have questions, I'd be happy to consult with you or help along the way. We've helped at this point dozens of destinations to do just that and we'd be happy to help you as well.
[00:34:35] So thank you everybody for listening. I'd say gear up, prepare yourselves, it's going to be an interesting year. We obviously don't know what the future holds, but I do think we're in for a challenging year. I think it's more important than ever to take the steps now to play the long game instead of the transactional game of just let's run an ad and get ahead in the bed. Let's build a loyal following, a loyal audience that's going to stick with us for years to come.
[00:35:01] Thanks, everybody. I hope you have a wonderful year. That's my New Year's Resolution episode. I'm really excited to see what you create over the course of the next year. Thanks, everybody for listening. Have a great week and a great year.
[End of Transcript]
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