State tourism conferences are a fantastic way to connect with destination marketers, share ideas and challenges, identify opportunities to partner with your state tourism board, and fill up your marketing toolkit with new strategies and inspiration.
This year’s Visit NC Tourism Conference brought North Carolina destinations, partners, and thought leaders together in Greenville, NC. Keynotes, breakout sessions, vendor presentations, destination conversations, and surprise guests (including Greenville’s own Petey Pablo!) were abundant over this three-day event. Continue reading for my top three takeaways from the Visit NC 2024 Tourism Conference.
1. AI is an Opportunity for Destination Marketing and Tourism
Most marketers are just dipping their toes in the AI waters. We know it can help us, but we’re afraid of what using AI could mean. This advanced technology raises questions like, how do you even use AI? And does using AI diminish the value of my job?
Mike Kaput, chief content officer for Marketing AI Institute did a phenomenal job of addressing these questions at the Visit NC Tourism Conference during his express keynote. He encouraged attendees to shift their mindsets to view AI as their copilot, not their competition. Using AI to handle monotonous and time-consuming tasks, gives destination teams the time to dream bigger.
How to Know When AI Could Be a Helpful Tool
Kaput recommends using this framework to identify if AI could be helpful for the task you’re working on. If the answer is yes to any of them, then AI could quickly become your new best friend.
AI Task Framework:
- Is it data-driven?
- It is repetitive?
- Is it making a prediction?
- Is it generative; does it create an output?
AI can be helpful across destination marketing tasks including content creation, social media, paid advertising, and SEO.
Content Creation AI Use Cases & Tools
A destination requires a lot of content to fuel a full-funnel visitor marketing journey. Kaput recommends using AI, like ChatGPT+ and other relevant AI tools like Writer for these destination content creation use cases:
- Develop blog and podcast outlines
- Create itineraries and guides by target visitor audience
- Generate videos and images
Social Media AI Use Cases & Tools
When it comes to social media, the number of ideal platforms and content needed can be overwhelming for destinations. Kaput recommends using social media AI tools like Agorapulse and Lately to manage these destination social media content tasks:
- Write and rewrite social media content for different audiences
- Predict virality on potential clips using a virality score
- Generate short-form videos for social media posts
Paid Advertising AI Use Cases & Tools
Depending on the number of audiences and platforms, managing paid advertising campaigns can be quite challenging for destinations. AI could quickly become your campaign ally when completing the paid advertising tasks below. Additionally, Kaput recommends using AI tools like Persado and Celtra to complete these paid advertising AI use cases:
- Generate ad copy and creative
- Create ads at scale, especially if running across multiple platforms
- Optimize ad budgets
- Incorporate personalized ad copy
- Predict landing page performance
SEO AI Use Cases & Tools
Effectively managing your destination’s SEO can be a full-time job. AI can not only provide strategic SEO support, but it can also complete SEO tasks at a larger scale. Kaput recommends using AI tools to assist with your destination’s website including MarketMuse for predictable content performance and AllAi to make on-page SEO updates. Consider using AI tools to assist with these SEO tasks:
- Rank higher for search terms by market
- Outrank the competition by addressing gaps
- Make on-page SEO updates at scale
- Create destinations specific customized versions
- Answer FAQs at scale
2. Optimize Visitor Data to Help Support the Visitor Experience
The concept of destinations bridging the data gap was a repeated theme at the 2024 Visit NC Tourism Conference. It was highlighted during keynotes, breakout sessions, and in conversations. If your destination has been faithfully capturing visitor data for years, continue reading to learn new opportunities to use it. And if your destination has struggled to capture data, today is a great day to begin!
Prepare Your Destination for a Cookieless Future
As we move into a cookieless future, a destination’s data quickly becomes a huge asset when it comes to tourism advertising. Kelly Smith, VP of advertising at Datafy highlighted the industry shifts in the way mobile devices are collecting data. Moving away from users sharing data in the background, when they’re not actively using their phone or an app to foreground data collection, which means data will only be shared when they’re actively using their phone or app.
If you’re currently running advertising campaigns or want to in the coming year, consider these three ways that this data collection change will affect your advertising campaigns:
- Niche audiences are likely to become more expensive. Use 1st party data like email lists to keep targeting costs more budget-friendly. If your destination isn’t currently collecting first-party data, start today.
- Demographic targeting may become unreliable and will most likely disappear. Consider using AI tools to personalize the ad experience to your target visitors.
- Advertising targeting will likely lean more into geo-based or market-focused targeting. Additionally, contextual targeting strategies like running ads on relevant sites/placements will see an increase.
How to Begin Collecting Visitor Data
If your destination has faced challenges collecting visitor data, the breakout session on Optimizing Visitor Data for Sustainable Economies was a delightful reminder that you don’t always need a huge budget or fancy technology to better understand who is visiting and how they’re experiencing your destination.
Beth Heile from the Friends of the Valdese Rec shared how they used eco-counters at the Valdese Lakeside Park park entrances and intercept surveys over three days to better understand their visitors. Using the data they collected, they were able to share the value of the park and identify the economic impact of visitors, including how often they visited the town of Valdese to eat or shop, after visiting the park.
3. Destinations Should Use Owned Media Channels to Build Their Audience
As the advertising landscape continues to make it more challenging and costly for destinations to reach their target audiences (see takeaway number two above), Adam Stoker, president and CEO of Relic, encouraged Visit NC Tourism Conference attendees to invest in their owned marketing channels.
How to Create Demand Using Your Owned Media Channels
In a media landscape where people are consuming content that’s interesting to them, Stoker recommends leaning into owned media channels like podcasts, to generate demand and increase the volume of visitors traveling through a destination’s owned media audience journey.
It’s important when developing owned content not to focus on the sales pitch. Instead, focus on activating and engaging your audience. For example, Visit Myrtle Beach has created their I Speak Mama podcast not to sell visitors, but to highlight the local community and increase potential visitor interest and engagement.
How to Identify Content Pillars for Your Destination
The first step to developing owned media content for our destination is identifying the content pillars or key messages for your destination, which starts by answering these four questions:
- What makes you different from any other destination?
- What audience is most passionate about your destination?
- What type of entertainment fits your destination best? (humor, drama, mystery, etc.)
- What format matches the audience, budget, and criteria?
Based on your answers, identify the ideal content format or medium to share your key messages. That can include a podcast, YouTube series, quizzes, and blog posts. The content mediums you select should also align with your audience’s media consumption behaviors, and your destination’s resources and budget.
Conclusion
The 2024 Visit NC Tourism Conference left me with nine pages of notes, empowering tactics, and multiple ideas on how I can more strategically support destinations and tourism brands with their paid advertising, social media, and content strategies. Follow me on LinkedIn for more destination marketing ideas and campaign insights.
Did you attend the 2024 Visit NC Tourism Conference? I’d love to hear your key takeaways. Comment below or drop me a note.
