Visit Orlando's president & CEO George Aguel (pictured) invites visitors to share their personal stories and memories of the destination.
With more pressure than ever for cities to stand out from the rest, destination marketing organizations are finding creative new ways to lure visitors and groups. The latest efforts include storytelling, viral pranks, spectacular HD videos, virtual-reality tours and more. Following, M&C profiles the attention-getting campaigns of four DMOs.
Orlando's new storytellers
Orlando is a destination that inspires deep emotional connections in visitors of all ages and demographics. (Who can forget the first thrilling time they met Mickey and Minnie?) Rather than downplaying those memories and emotions -- elements many destinations deliberately sidestep when promoting business travel and meetings -- Orlando has made a pointed decision to embrace and celebrate its ties to fun times when marketing to all of its varied segments, including meeting-goers.
"We want to remind them of those happy memories and consider making them again," says George Aguel, president and CEO of Visit Orlando.
For its latest campaign, launched last August, the DMO hopes to mine potential customers' personal memories and share them with the world, via its website, orlandostories.com, and associated social media channels.
In addition to the usual "what's new" story, says Aguel, this time there's a fresh focus on people. "We want visitors, including meeting and incentive attendees, to share their stories and selfies of their time here."
Aguel feels the campaign will influence planners, too. Today, he says, "planners need to look where attendees want to go, rather than choose a destination and expect people to follow out of loyalty. If you select places attendees love to visit and have great feelings about, it's natural they'll attend."
Since the campaign was launched, Visit Orlando has seen spike in social media and plans to keep collecting stories throughout 2016.
L.A. gets hyper-local
At 472 square miles, Los Angeles is a large city. Its vast expanse, incorporating 10 regions and dozens of neighborhoods, can be intimidating to out-of-towners, a fact not lost on Darren K. Green, senior vice president of sales for the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board.
When he joined the DMO in 2014, Green was determined to make the city more accessible for planners, in a manner befitting its glittering image. Ultimately that meant creating a new, innovative meetings website.
At the outset, Green was impressed with the LATCB's existing consumer site, discoverla.com (launched in 2012), which he felt did a great job of showcasing L.A. The site offers breathtaking panoramic videos of the city and its diverse neighborhoods, along with insider tips curated by local celebrities such as Mario Lopez, Magic Johnson and Rob Lowe.
"Many of the same things that drive consumers to a destination -- experiences, authenticism -- are what drive meeting attendees," notes Green.
Last fall, the new meetla.com site debuted, incorporating the look and feel of the consumer site, along with features based on input from customers and the local hospitality community.
The content-rich, easy-to-navigate site features HD video tours of the different sections of L.A., as well as functionality that allows planners to conduct venue and supplier searches and download fact sheets, according to regions. Highlighted areas include Beach Cities/Los Angeles International Airport, Santa Monica, Westside, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood, the Valley, Downtown and Pasadena. The site also offers lists of unique event spaces, green venues and 10 unusual group dining spots.
The site continues to evolve. This past November saw the addition of a section with video testimonials from pleased planners who have held events in L.A. This feature has quickly become such a critical component, says Green, that the DMO recently hired a content manager to curate the planners' stories.
Since its launch, the website has seen a tenfold increase in the number of users, while the time planners spend on the site has jumped by 20 percent.
Planners can expect more enhancements to the site going forward."It's a living, breathing tool that we have to constantly update," says Green.
British Columbia's virtual reality
Imagine soaring above, around and along the pristine green peaks and crystalline waters of the Great Bear Rainforest, a remote corner of British Columbia, all from the floor of a trade show via a deceptively simple cardboard virtual-reality viewfinder.
That was how Destination British Columbia lured a record number of visitors to its stand during the 2015 ITB, the international travel show held last March in Berlin (view the video tour
here). "A lot of our competitors sell the same things we do: blue skies, smiling people, cosmopolitan cities and the sea," explains Maya Lange, vice president of global marketing at the Canadian DMO. "We wanted a way to stand out."
Destination B.C. was justly considered groundbreaking for its use of virtual reality in destination marketing. To achieve its aims, the DMO had to create its own 360-degree camera (a number are available now), and the organization was even featured during a session on "marketing all-stars" that was held during DMAI's annual conference in Austin last July.
Not surprisingly, Destination B.C. plans to create more virtual-reality experiences for consumers and even the meetings industry. The technology is evolving so quickly that users no longer need viewfinders -- they can watch via YouTube, which now supports 360 video.
St. Pete/Clearwater's viral prank
Basing a viral marketing campaign around a fictional creature was a huge risk that yielded outstanding results for Visit St. Petersburg/Clearwater.
The campaign -- created to celebrate and showcase the fun side of the Florida destination -- centered around the "manaphin," a fantastical hybrid of two of the destination's real-life wildlife stars, dolphins and manatees. The DMO and its ad agency crafted a digital image of the animal and launched a website (now defunct), featuring a tiny, low-key Visit St. Pete/Clearwater logo, for the creature and a non-working video link.
A press release about the manaphin was released to international media on April Fool's Day 2014 and quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of hits around the globe, and even more in the aftermath, when the DMO was revealed as the source of the joke.
"It was even named the top prank of the year by ABC News," notes David Downing, executive director of Visit St. Pete/Clearwater.
"We didn't do this just to be cute; it was a marketing outreach and a way to make our brand stand out," says Downing, who adds that "the ROI across all markets -- leisure, meetings, sports travel -- was off the charts; it's almost incalculable."
St. Pete/Clearwater's manaphin
campaign has inspired the creation
of a local brew (left). The mythical
beast is pictured on the right.
More than a year later, Downing says he is "forever surprised" when he sees people in different parts of the world -- most recently in New York City -- wearing T-shirts and caps sporting the signature manaphin image. The St. Pete/Clearwater creation has become such a phenomenon that it inspired the local Green Bench Brewery to create a Manaphin Stout.
The bottom line, says Downing, is that "we are not a business that makes cancer drugs. You have to live your brand, which in our case is playful, fun and sunny."
To see more details about the campaign, see the "Making of the Manaphin".