There’s no denying the swiftness and pervasiveness of the impact that the Coronavirus has had on tourism. The stock market is showing us that the tourism sectors seeing the greatest impact are cruises, crowded places and locations that require airline travel. Unless you have a Clorox Theme Park in your community, you are likely to be seeing deceleration of tourism in your community.
A friend of mine once told me there are three types of people: Those who watch things happen, those who make things happen and those who don’t have a clue what’s happening. It’s easy to take a “wait and see what happens” approach, and hope things blow over quickly. But more than two decades in the industry tells me that those who will succeed in this emerging challenge will resort to making things happen.
What can be done to boost tourism in the middle of a concerned COVID-19 constituency?
Look to where people are willing to go. People will still drive to a destination. They will also be likely to visit locations that don’t involve large crowds, such as outdoor recreational areas, small group excursions, adventure activities (ATV, off-roading, zip lines, etc.) and places with great little restaurants, shops, walks and places to relax. Most communities have several opportunities like these that are resilient.
The key is in packaging those experiences and finding the tourist quickly that have a predilection and history of visiting these sorts of venues. The following steps can guide you to more bookings:
- Identify the Points of Interest (POI’s) in your community that would appeal to wary travelers.
- Create a “visitor persona” for the current coming season with the demographic and psychographic data of those who have previously visited the POI’s identified in your community.
- Create look-a-like audiences based on the persona.
- Use Advertiser ID’s to place ads to the mobile devices of the look-a-like audiences created.
- Measure the effectiveness of those campaigns by tracking visitors through cell phone GPS data on a live dashboard.
- Iterate in real-time based on outcomes.
If you don’t have the data to perform these steps, please email or call us at 801-823-0083 and we can provide a dashboard with this information at a surprisingly affordable price.
If you are currently a See Source customer and would like help with these steps please call Candie at 801-823-0083.
It’s time to make things happen!
