In destination marketing, it can sometimes feel daunting to try to tell your story, justify your funding, or communicate the value of your efforts.
Too often, marketing teams rely on vanity metrics like impressions or click-through rates that fail to resonate with stakeholders: Sure, we got X clicks on our ads, but what does that mean to my hotel or restaurant?
Impact reporting uses data-backed insights to shape and refine the entire strategic planning cycle and tell a compelling story of success. The process starts by defining long-term goals and optimizing demand to ensure every strategic marketing effort is aimed at generating quality visits. Then, rather than just looking into the past at what has already happened, impact reporting seeks to leverage the performance trends revealed in the data for future action.
Travel Lane County is a private non-profit that supports and promotes tourism to a large county in Oregon anchored by Eugene and Springfield. As the Senior Director of Tourism Marketing, Stephen Hoshaw uses the Zartico Destination Operating System® (ZDOS®) to improve how the organization measures and reports success, educates stakeholders, plans for the future, and communicates the value of its marketing efforts.
Maximizing a modest budget
Travel Lane County has what Stephen calls a “fairly modest” marketing budget of under $600,000, so he has to be very strategic about how to deploy those funds. In 2023, the organization received a one-time budget influx and decided to take the opportunity to use what it had learned from the Zartico platform to refine its approach.
ZDOS® revealed that the San Francisco area was showing higher average spending than other markets, so Stephen’s team decided to allocate the extra funds toward generating an impact there. “It was a large test for us to see what that could look like — and how we could start to translate it into current and future learnings,” he explains.
With the origin market selected, Travel Lane County used Zartico to drive its two-prong approach:
The campaign ran for five months on top of an always-on marketing push that ran through the agency’s fiscal year. After the campaigns wrapped up, Stephen’s team developed a website contribution report against the benchmark of the previous year. The results were clear: During the campaign, San Francisco had bumped up into the top five markets that looked at Travel Lane County’s web content and then came to visit.
“It was a real ‘aha moment’ moment for us to say, Wow, we can actually use this to look at other kinds of impact reporting,” Stephen recalls. “We took those learnings into consideration as we designed our current fiscal plan.”
Aligning regional strategies for synergistic impact
Building off its takeaways from the San Francisco campaign, Travel Lane County developed a more detailed web contribution report by identifying top converting pages and using that data to refine its content strategies. “It’s really helpful for us to monitor visitation from specific pages, because we can take those specific storytelling efforts and feed them back into the prospecting page and some of our regional pages,” Stephen explains.
The 10 communities under Travel Lane County’s purview are all highly engaged in the tourism economy. So the team focused on sharing ZDOS® insights with those communities and their tourism committees.
By breaking down data to show specific impacts on different regions, Stephen’s team was able to foster better collaboration and strategic planning at the local level and help convey the direct benefits of county-wide marketing efforts. “As we’re having those conversations of how to do better, tighter strategic planning together, [Zartico] reports have been really helpful,” he says.
Educating stakeholders on quality metrics
A key part of Travel Lane County’s success lies in reeducating stakeholders about what constitutes valuable metrics. Historically, the destination marketing industry has relied heavily on sheer visitor numbers or economic impact in dollar terms. While these metrics are important, they don’t tell the whole story, because not every visit is equal.
A visit’s quality can vary greatly based on factors such as the visitor’s origin, spending habits, and the time of year. Travel Lane County works with stakeholders to define what a quality visit looks like for their community and how data from ZDOS® can help improve that metric.
“As we’re talking impact and learning how this works, there’s a lot of educational work that goes into highlighting these [quality metrics],” Steven explains. “It really helped clarify [what we’re doing] and let us spell out tighter strategies after that.”
A focus on quality visits is the difference between looking at what happened in the past — click-through rates, CPM, engagement — and projecting into the future by asking what that data means for each community and how specifically to move the needle.
Driving and communicating value with Zartico
Travel Lane County’s approach goes beyond just showing numbers. Stephen and his team use impact reporting to tell a compelling story of how their efforts translate into impact. By demonstrating the direct benefits of their marketing strategies, they optimize their budget while building stronger relationships with local stakeholders.
As the organization continues to refine its campaigns and incorporate new ZDOS® insights, impact reporting remains the beacon lighting the path to success.
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