Drive more customers to your destination

It’s People Science

Most of the brands in the high-end resort, travel, real estate, and hospitality markets that we talk to answer “no” to the above question. In today’s fast-paced, post-Covid, rising-interest-rate world, reaching and engaging new prospects and customers is the number one priority—and the competition is fiercer than ever. Every piece of marketing content you create should pass a simple test:

If I were my target audience(s), would this content make me want to read, watch, or learn more about it?

All of your marketing initiatives—both digital and traditional tactics—should be relevant, interesting, engaging, and helpful. It should fulfill a current need, wish, or want, and provide a clear solution. Above all, it should make people want to know more about your destination so that they will plan a vacation or a visit. An experienced, pro-active destination marketing company can help you engage more qualified leads and turn those leads into customers. Let’s first consider a few key digital marketing facts:

Did You Know? Hospitality and Tourism Facts

• Hotel guests reviewed multiple options before making a booking decision
• 95% of visitors to hotel websites abandon the booking cart
• Nearly 70% of travelers make same-day hotel reservations on a smartphone

Did You Know? Real Estate Facts

• 90+% of home buyers start with an online search
• Google real estate searches for master-planned communities have doubled since Covid
• 70% of home shoppers who engage on a real estate website begin by typing a local search term or phrase

Four “Must-Haves” Your Agency Should Deliver

1. Experiential User Experience

If you want to attract people to your destination you must offer them an appetizing taste. Whether you are a luxury master-planned community in the Cascade Mountains or 5-Star Resort in the Caribbean, your target audience needs to visualize, experience and “feel” why your destination is so unique and special.

Digital Marketing and Social Platforms offer plenty of opportunities to give would-be guests, vacationers, or buyers a glimpse of what you’re all about. The best brands incorporate high-quality professional video experiences into their marketing efforts. To take it one step further, elite marketing agencies offer Augmented Reality (AR), which is the next best thing to “being there.” AR gives you the ability to add digitally enhanced images/content to a live camera feed to make it appear as if the new content is “real,” and part of the environment to which it has been overlaid. It has opened up a whole new way for resorts, hoteliers, and real estate communities to dazzle and engage new prospects.

2. Regularly Updated Website

This should be a given, but many luxury brands have an old, neglected, or outdated website that has become a liability for optimal lead generation. You can’t simply build a new site and forget about it. Google frequently adapts its algorithm to emphasize user experience, search parameters, and mobile compatibility as ranking factors.

That means, in order to be more effective, brands must stay current with algorithm shifts or risk being penalized in the future. Responsive design, quick load times, efficient navigation, and frequently updated content are key ranking factors. Not having an up-to-date, technologically efficient website is no longer an option. In fact, it is fundamental to success, as Google continues to prioritize SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for mobile sites that are optimized to deliver a better user experience.

3. Effective Paid Digital Advertising

Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is critical. Everyone offers it but few do it well. Done right, SEM provides more ways to reach highly targeted audiences than ever before. The continued evolution of digital media—keywords, sponsored ads and stories, display banners, remarketing/retargeting, and so on—has made it easier than ever for marketers to surgically identify, engage, and convert real estate and hospitality prospects.

Brands can now stay in touch with customers for the entire length of the sales cycle, and beyond. However, in order to reach busy people “where they live and breathe,” a strategically sound and ever-adaptive mobile strategy is imperative. As everyone knows by now, people are on mobile devices much more often than they are on desktop computers. Just ask Google.

4. Surgical Geo-Targeting

Over the past couple of years, advances in technology have opened up a whole new world in real-time marketing. After all, people generally carry a mobile phone or device with them at all times.

The result is that it’s now possible to find and target prospects and customers in the actual here-and-now based on their specific geographic location. Through such initiatives as geo-targeting (pinpointing users based on their location range) and geo-fencing (pinpointing users when they enter a pre-determined area), businesses are able to identify prime targets when they’re in a given area, tailor specific messages to them that are highly relevant, and then mine the actual data to uncover legitimate high-quality leads and prospects.

Three Questions To Ask Your Agency

1. Can They Find New Eyeballs?

This is the biggest problem that most luxury resorts, hoteliers, and real estate communities have to overcome: finding new qualified customers. The digital landscape is ever-evolving. Technology has expanded the playing field and made it more difficult to grow market share in the hospitality industry.

Highly targeted strategic digital is the best way to stay ahead of the competition by finding new, often untapped, target audience “pools.” Searching by location/zip code, as well as by specific demo- and psychographics, brands can dial into high-quality leads that need/want/crave what you have to offer.

A seasoned team of digital marketers cannot only identify where these “hidden” prospects are, but they can devise effective tactics to get their attention and win them over.

2. Can They Help You Nurture Those Prospects?

Identifying and locating prospective customers and new target segments is only part of the battle. Your company must successfully engage them on their own terms.

The hard sell will not work. Digital marketing allows you to reach out to these prospects and nurture them throughout the entire sales cycle—regardless of where they enter.

New technology, interactive platforms, and social channels make it possible to develop these leads at every step by:

1. engaging them with helpful information
2. offering them the solutions they’re looking for
3. building their trust

While all three of these are important, the latter is especially critical to securing new customers. Effective destination marketing enables you to begin a genuine dialog with your prospects that will ultimately convert into actual sales.

3. Can They Help You Be More Efficient And Effective?

Perhaps the most important aspect of destination marketing is transparency. Everything should be tracked and analyzed.

When we say everything, we mean everything: Search Ads, Banners, Paid Ads, Sponsored Posts, Landing Pages, Automated Emails, Page Views, Special Offers, and so on.

If an agency tells you they can’t track analytics or show you detailed data, then they are either not qualified or lying. That’s simply a fact.

A seasoned marketing agency will produce and test a number of messages and tactics to leverage what works and evolve accordingly.

This, in turn, will enable you to be more cost efficient by increasing leads while lowering your cost per click (CPC) or cost per acquisition (CPA). And that goes straight to your bottom line.