Forget the political pollsters, Destination DC has its eye on different data
At last week’s eMetrics Summit I had the good fortune to catch up with some really switched on US based destination marketers.
One of those people was Andy Whittaker, Marketing Research Manager for Destination DC. We spoke about the challenges of marketing a place that is on every American’s travel must-do list.
And we philosophised about the incredible challenges of accurately measuring return on investment in destination marketing, when the influencing factors on the travel decision can be so emotional, intangible and thoroughly complicated! (Those guys selling planks of wood and software don’t know how lucky they are!)
He explained “Tourism marketing faces such a huge analysis challenge beyond those faced by consumer goods. As an industry we’re trying to build awareness, increase loyalty, develop advocates, build visitors – but all these others factors are involved. There are perceptions of fuel costs, emotional responses to uncertainty, competition from destinations all over the world. With limited budget the challenge is to how manage and measure all these things and understand ROI – it’s really difficult.”
A marriage made in heaven
Andy is one of an increasing number of tourism marketers making the shift from pure market research, to a broader role that encompasses web strategy and analysis. With the offical DC Tourism website now coming under his remit, research is blending into web analytics and online data is being harnessed to drive strategy. Yes, it’s hard – but it is also critically important.
Andy is absolutely right to note that combining research and online analysis is a powerful tool in understanding visitor behaviour and improving marketing strategy and effectiveness on the back of that. So often destinations have been led reluctantly online by their own consumers – but standing back while other destinations nail online strategy simply isn’t an option.
“There must be a joined up research approach – the marriage between consumer behaviour and emotional aspects of travel has to be factored in across all channels”
Experienced base web messaging
So earlier this year, the city rebranded itself with a new marketing strategy inviting visitors to create their own “power trips” to Washington DC and emphasising the city’s neighbourhoods beyond the traditional tourist haunts of the Mall and White House. Following extensive brand research, key experiences/persona roles were developed that web visitors can self-identify with to plan their trip and “experience DC.”
Knowledge seekers, urban explorers, families and more all get differently targeted content, based on the pillars identified in the research and the expanded product offering. Andy explains:
“DC has a smaller number of repeat visits compared to competitor cities. Many visitors to DC are getting a surface level experience, just seeing the big attractions. But there is so much more to product, we’d love to attract more repeat business – taking visitors to a new level of experience by exposing them to different layers of the product”.
It seems to me that the experience customisation on the site is still in its early days – there is so much more potential. I would have liked to be able to create my personal experience then easily transfer it to my Blackberry or iPod and hit the streets. But the approach as it stands now is successfully delivering on these objectives of offering a depth and breadth of potential experience. They seem to be on the right track of a smart world city destination, rather than an urban theme park experience.
Innovating for the international market
And product innovation is a necessity. International visitors are lucrative business. They make up only about 8 percent of visitors to DC, but they account for more than 25% of tourism spending (contributing more than $1,000 per visitor on average, compared with less than $300 per domestic visitor).
Washington DC faces increasing competition worldwide – their UK and Canada markets, for example, are being heavily targeted by many other destinations worldwide. The India, China and French markets are growing – but Destination DC realise they need to understand the messages potential visitors are getting from other destinations globally.
Smartly and despite limited resources (Destination DC invests $1million a year in paid marketing/advertising – a small fraction of New York, Las Vegas or Orlando’s investment), they are focussing efforts on understand differing international market trends relating broadband, e-readiness, direct online purchase trends etc.
Traditionally international markets have been marketed to through trade channels – but this is changing too. Destination DC realises it needs to go direct to consumers through online marketing activities, because this is how travellers now plan and to some varying extents purchase their trips.
For Andy, the eMetrics Summit seems to have been something of an epiphany (of the data variety of course!)
“I came into this conference to better understand how to better utilise the basic web analytics data like pages views etc. But what I have seen is the bigger and more powerful picture. The opportunity to understand voice of customer online, to measure satisfaction and tie it all together in terms of how we are meeting specific strategic goals.”
Be very afraid New York, Las Vegas, Orlando and London! Destination DC have seen what they can do with their data and they’re not afraid to exploit it for unfair advantage.
Let us know how it goes Andy!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 7:52 am and is filed under Conference learnings, Data, Destination research, Industry interview, 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.