PROFESSIONAL/ Destination Marketing – Effective Strategies

It’s not easy for small cities to attract positive attention, but it is easy to forget that the rest of the world is not as interested in our hometown as those of us who live there. Small cities generally have rare opportunities to capture our attention or to impress the outside world. Each year, thousands of small places across the USA come to the forefront in the national media for a few seconds in news reports or other events, and then disappear from our radar again. We usually don’t spend...

If your city has a nickname, it adds to your identity. It says something about the people who live there – their values, what they view as important. Whether it is official or unofficial, a nickname tells a story about your city and begins to establish a brand. Your city’s brand has economic value in terms of attracting visitors. The top-ranked nicknames are The Big Apple (New York City), Sin City (Las Vegas), The Big Easy (New Orleans), Motor City (Detroit) and The Windy City (Ch...

Dear person who handles the marketing budget for your travel destination: In case you have not been reading the news, the media landscape rug has been pulled out from under you. What have you done to adjust? I’m a travel writer who writes a lot and travels a lot. In the past year, I’ve had two dozen PR and marketing people working in travel tell me that their boss or executive board is at least a decade behind the times in their marketing focus. While my contact person telling me ...

Just before I toddled off to Australia for a couple of weeks in mid-February, I read an interesting interview on Sheffield Blog with Wendy Ulyett, tourism manager for Marketing Sheffield. Among the topics covered were why Sheffield is now being promoted separately from Yorkshire South (and let’s face it, promoting a non-existent entity called ‘Yorkshire South’ was always an appalling idea in the first place) and aspirations to make Sheffield one of the top five cities to vis...

Life is good for the traveler who knows where they are going. There are dozens of great and useful sites online where you can see everything from reviews of hotels to side by side comparisons of airfares from one destination to another. Planning a trip to San Francisco was never so easy ... but what if you haven't answered the first and most important question of where you want to go? All of a sudden, life is a lot more difficult. Finding out about destinations is a labyrinth of government spons...