Key 1: Understand Hyper-local Activity Space
While a DMO is obligated to market an entire region, visitors build activity spaces around things as small as a favorite hotel or a street corner festival. Visitors don’t see destinations the way destination marketers do. In fact, they don’t even see destinations the way that other visitors do. Each activity space is unique in that it comprises a collection of personal discoveries emanating outward from a geographic or psychological hub. Moreover, activity spaces grow, but rarely change at their epicenters. Over time the epicenter becomes a home away from home—a place from which a traveler ventures out toward an ever-growing activity perimeter. Destination marketers cannot grow the perimeter artificially. Perimeters grow through serendipitous exploration. What the destination marketer can do is seed the perimeter with glimpses of landscapes outside the visitor’s mental map. That is to say, build-out from the known into the unknown. She can also inform the visitor of opportunity depth within the visitor’s existing activity space. This is the promise of fee-for-marketing technology—to allow visitors to build their own activity containers and then pour informed content into their bowls.
Key 2: Build-outwards by Thinking Hyper-locally
The future of successful destination marketing won’t be involved with promoting destinations at a single large scale. Successful marketers will inform visitors with content and technologies that build-out from intimate geographic hubs as well as build-in from areas that are remote to the visitor’s actual activity space.
Key 3: Think Beyond Memberships
A war is raging between fee-for-marketing services vs. membership pricing. Even if a DMO isn’t part of it yet, it will come to find them because irresistible market forces like Google and Travelocity (gorillas in the room) are drawing lines in the sand that put DMO interests and theirs in separate quadrants. Gorilla fee-for-marketing activities will prompt reappraisals of the DMO value proposition in that businesses will start to ask how they can justify paying for organizational memberships when the fee-for-marketing gorillas offer better and more nimble capacities for free.
The battle will surround very simple issues like how to differentiate local businesses in ways other than listing them, among all other businesses of their kind, on page 87 of a typical DMO website. Fee-for-marketing service providers bring the battle to the street corner vis-à-vis local and targeted advertising that engages visitors in self-defined activity spaces. If the destination marketer can’t replicate this sense of engagement, offering members a chance to be a footnote listing in a large regional awareness strategy may not justify a hefty membership commitment.
Key 4: Emphasize Performance
The new marketing battle between fee-for-marketing service vs. membership pricing won’t be won. It will be negotiated. The optimal marketing model will be a mix wherein the marketer continues to inspire travelers to come to a destination while facilitating them at the hyper-local level. At the larger scale, traditional performance models will still predominate. At local-levels, web traffic will be less relevant. It will be the job of technologists to develop hyper-local mobile and analytical frameworks that demonstrate value to members that pay to be seen as valuable opportunities on their own street corners.
