Local destination management and marketing groups face a challenge.
They need to make a strong demonstration of their value and impact in order to attract and retain the participation of local tourism businesses. Yet their outputs are not necessarily easily expressed in terms of direct sales.
National tourism data is rarely expressed in a way that reflects the specific geographic area of interest to the local organisation. Nor do they necessarily get to see the member businesses sales data that arise from their efforts - making straight return on investment calculations challenging.
So, how can local destination marketing and management groups demonstrate value?
Defining success on your terms
Until you really define success, you can’t measure it. But again, at a local destination level, it isn’t always easy.
For the individual tourism business, success is ultimately defined by revenue. No profits, then eventually no business. Occupancy rates, spend per head and customer satisfaction are all useful performance indicators - but cash is king.
At a national level, tourism success is judged by criteria closely allied to government goals and interests. These include economic indicators (such as tourism share of employment and gdp, or growth in revenues). They may also be linked to inward investment, international image and brand perception.
But for local destinations and their marketing groups - from tourism groups, chambers of commerce, to formal destination management organisations - simply defining success can be a lot harder.
This is because the tourism marketing goals of local destinations are not always simply a case of increasing overall visitor numbers. But pinning down that definition of success is critical, because it is what all goals, strategies and demonstration of results ultimately hinge on.
So what form might success take for a local destination?
- increasing or widening the distribution of visitor spend
- shifting the brand position, for example to a more luxury destination
- growing spend, tax revenues or number of bednights per visit
- boosting local employment off peak season
- increasing online visibility of the destination
- regenerating economic or environmental decay
- building a sustainable community tourism model
- increasing visitor participation in events & activities
- improving the competitiveness or attractiveness of the destination, compared to others
There may even be a degree of social enterprise, redistributing the benefits of economies of scale to community businesses.
So, with so many possible options for what success might constitute to a local destination, defining precisely what the goals and objectives are is the first major step towards demonstrating how successfully they’re being achieved.
From there it becomes easier to match those goals to possible performance indicators.
Know where you are now, as well as where you want to be
It is only possible to demonstrate the impact of your efforts if have some kind of starting point to measure from. Ideally that means a proper destination audit, including an honest assessment of the current performance and resources. When doing this kind of research, we tend to look both at the supply side resources, quality, capacity and distribution. We also look at the demand side by speaking to visitors about quality of their experience and where possible examining comment data.
Its also important to define a timed framework of where you want to get next - after all, sometimes success for a destination in simply stopping further decline.
Once you know where you are and the time frame for action, it makes it easier to look at your data sources and pick your benchmarks.
What are your data sources?
Perhaps more than any type of tourism organisation, local groups suffer from lack of ownership of the critical revenue and satisfaction data they need to measure their success. Therefore as I see it, at least two options are open.
1) Do a really good job of convincing local business to share their data with you. This could be by offering more value and analysis from that information than it would have in isolation (ie the whole visit view, rather than a view of one link in the chain).
2) Pick benchmarks that you can control and relate to the data you do have access to. This could involve doing your own periodic surveys, using local tax data, using web analytics data, or as I have described previously - working with something as practical as sewage data!
These are not exclusive, of course - you can do both. But there is no need to let the fact you can’t get sales data be a barrier to measuring your success.
Selecting your measurement criteria
Ultimately, you won’t know if you’re successful or not if you don’t measure consistently.
A handful of key performance indicators, ratios that are benchmarked over time, will reveal your progress.
And these don’t need to be hugely complex. For example, a key performance indicator related to increasing visitor participation in events & activities could be the ratio of non local postcodes amongst total event attendees.
Keeping measures/KPIs strongly aligned to the goals/stated success outcomes also helps to really tighten the focus on what information is going to be needed from others.
If the tourism group then needs to ask member businesses for specific information to help that measurement, or they need to conduct research directly, they will be able to restrict their efforts to just looking at those factors that matter (as opposed to thankless task of trying to measure everything!)
So, to conclude, the key to getting to grips with local tourism success is first to really define what a successful outcome is.
From there, gather relevant supporting evidence to assess whether the goal has been achieved (by gathering your own data or asking local businesses to provide only what is really required). Keep it simple by only measuring and reporting on what really matters to you. Finally, communicate your success back to the area, backed up with tangible data!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 5:21 am and is filed under Destination research, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.