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Tourism for CVBs and DMOs – 7 Benefits of Household-Level Segmentation

If you lead tourism marketing efforts at a convention and visitors bureau (CVB) or a destination marketing organization (DMO), you are probably always looking for better ways to attract tourists to your city or town. However, many find themselves caught in the vicious cycle of launching tactically-driven campaign after campaign, rather than taking a truly strategic approach.

A marketing campaign without an umbrella strategy is like a ship without a rudder: it will get somewhere eventually, but likely not where you wanted to go.

All good strategy starts with data. In the case of marketing for CVBs and DMOs, that data is your historical visitor data. By analyzing your historical visitor data, you can develop a rich, detailed profile of your best historical visitors. You can then use this profile to build a strategy, targeted campaign that drives more tourism dollars for your marketing investment.

Some CVBs and DMOs try to conduct tourism segmentation based upon a ZIP code-level analysis alone. While this is certainly a good start, it doesn’t come close to the power of analyzing visitors at the household level. If ZIP-level segmentation is a 1, household-level segmentation is a 10 in terms of precision of results and in terms of actionability.

A household-level analysis of your city’s historical visitors is more attainable than you think, even if you do not have a powerful CRM database or a team of statisticians on hand. It can start with something as simple as past visitors’ home addresses or e-mail addresses.

The analysis – which is conducted in a manner that is completely anonymous vis-a-vis any single visitor’s personal information, will provide a treasure trove of information that will help your team market more effectively.

Whether you are trying to get heads in beds, increase visits to your downtown shopping district, or promoting specific events, household-level segmentation can be cornerstone of a winning strategy that drives results.

Here are 7 benefits of using household-level segmentation for driving new tourism traffic to your city or town:

1. Know their basic demographic profile: Are they families, couples without kids, or single? How much money do they make? Do they live in rural, urban, or suburban neighborhoods? This information, while basic, provides a solid foundation for understanding who your best visitors are.

2. Gain insights into their interests and likes: Psychographic information entails your best visitors’ habits, interests, attitudes, opinions, and likes about shopping, lifestyle and travel. Such insights can help you sketch a rich profile of WHO your visitors are and what makes them tick.

3. Understand their motivations for making purchasing and lifestyle decisions: Are your best visitors people who like to get the most out of each new experience or do they prefer a more habitual lifestyle? Are they savers or spenders? Are they into exciting nightlife, wine tasting, or museums and culture? Household-level segmentation will reveal the answers to these questions and many, many more.

4. Gain insight into where your best prospects live and work: Even in our virtual world, when it comes to tourism, geography obviously matters. Segmentation can tell you how far each type of visitor is willing to travel to visit you – and where to find more of your best prospective visitors.

5. Identify rich, untapped pockets of prospects: Think you have already tapped out your usual geographies in terms of marketing outreach? Think again. With household-level targeting, you can send direct response marketing – like mailers and e-mails – to specific households rather than blanketing entire ZIP codes.

6. Identify their media-consumption habits: Which radio or TV stations do your visitors like? Which websites do they enjoy surfing? Which TV shows do they like? Knowing their media consumption habits will help you put together the most effective media plan possible.

7. Use the data as a strategic guide for messaging: With a segmentation report in hand, your entire team will be on the same page about who your best prospects are. Your creative team can use all of the above-mentioned insights to craft messages that speak directly to your best prospective visitors’ emotional buy buttons.

Performing household-level segmentation analysis for your CVB is the smartest way to build a truly strategic, targeted plan. This will be a plan around which you can build all of the coming year’s campaigns in an integrated way that truly drives results. Contact MindEcology today to find out how.