10 Ways Destination Marketers Use Zartico Data to Achieve Success
In today’s competitive marketing world, destination marketers need more than just raw data — they need actionable insights that drive results.
Enter Zartico, a cutting-edge technology company focused on delivering strategic planning and marketing optimization solutions that are rooted in reliable data. Our Zartico Destination Operating System® (ZDOS®) is the one-stop resource for marketers looking to turn complex data into impactful decisions.
Here are 10 ways ZDOS® can empower destination marketing professionals to maximize your time, understand your visitors, optimize your marketing strategies, and ultimately, elevate your destination's success.
Maximizing your time
Your calendar is packed, and your to-do list feels endless. The last thing you need is to waste time sifting through data for insights that might not even be actionable.
Zartico’s Destination Operating System (ZDOS®) is designed with efficiency in mind. It anticipates the questions you’re asking and presents the insights you need in a streamlined flow that complements our strategic planning principle philosophy. With easy export and email scheduling options, you can quickly utilize or share insights in reports, presentations, or directly with your team.
Understanding your current visitors
Knowing your audience is fundamental for any marketer. ZDOS® offers a clear window into who your visitors are, where they come from, how they spend, and the movement they take through your destination.
Next, go beyond the basics to uncover the markets driving the highest quality visits, as defined by your community's unique needs.
Identifying quality visits
Experienced destination marketers know that not all visits are created equal. In an era when the balance between tourism benefits and community impact is critical, Zartico’s Quality Visit Index highlights markets that contribute more value than cost to your tourism economy and community.
By analyzing key attributes like overnight stays, local spending, and content engagement, ZDOS® helps you focus your efforts on the top markets that bring real benefits to your destination.
Data in action: Visit Lake Charles used ZDOS® to explore a new opportunity market and launch a successful campaign targeting foodie travelers from Austin.
Building detailed visitor profiles
Once you’ve pinpointed the markets driving quality visits, the Profile Builder module makes it easy to create detailed visitor profiles.
In just two clicks, you can generate a profile that highlights how these markets interact with your destination differently than the overall visitor, from content preferences to visitation and spending habits. These profiles are invaluable tools for your marketing team, agencies, and media partners, ensuring targeted strategies that deliver impactful ROI.
Strategizing need vs. compression periods
The ZDOS® Strategic Planning module helps you identify periods of compression and opportunities for generating demand by looking at your visitor-to-resident ratio by month. With detailed insights into origin markets, you can distinguish between those that drive visitor volume and those that contribute more significantly to spending or are more likely to result in overnight stays.
Zartico’s Lodging Data goes even further, allowing you to analyze overnight visitation trends, including booking window, length of stay, and traditional lodging KPIs. Additionally, lodging pacing insights enable you to track future occupancy up to 180 days in advance, compare it to past performance, and benchmark against competitive destinations.
These robust insights empower you to make informed decisions about your marketing and management strategies. This includes detailed operational choices about campaign timing and placement, as well as bigger-picture shifts to align your efforts with your community’s goals and positively impact the future of your tourism economy
Optimizing campaigns and messaging
ZDOS® empowers you to fine-tune your marketing efforts by analyzing visitor behaviors, spending patterns, and content engagement. Whether it’s timing your content based on the “view to visit window” or refining your messaging, Zartico offers a suite of tools to optimize your marketing strategies.
Zartico is working to redefine attribution with a full-cycle approach — providing tools to guide planning and strategy; to optimize campaign messaging, content engagement, and publisher performance; and to report on impact with visitor arrivals, spending, and movement trends.
Data in action: Destination Madison used ZDOS® insights to build a comprehensive content plan to highlight key destination stories and drive high-quality visits.
Measuring your website’s influence
How much does your destination website contribute to the visitor economy?
Zartico’s Website Contribution module provides the answers by tracking visitor behavior before, during, and after their trips. You can analyze how far in advance travelers use your website, pinpoint which content is most influential in driving visitation and spending, and determine if visitors explore the same categories of places they researched online.
Additionally, the module allows you to measure campaign conversion rates and assess whether your messaging effectively disperses visitation throughout your destination.
Demonstrating your impact
You have a responsibility to your board, stakeholders, partners, and community to prove the impact of your efforts. ZDOS® provides comprehensive insights that showcase tourism’s impact — whether it’s on local restaurants, retail, accommodations, or attractions.
The Impact Report module offers a structured way to confidently capture and communicate the outcomes of your strategies to stakeholders. You can ensure they see the value in your work by sharing trends in overnight visitation, origin market, regional visitation, and spending. To understand and report on the impact of major events, the Event Impact module lets you quickly see how visitation and spending trends shift across your destination during the event dates.
Data in action: Charleston, W.V. uses ZDOS® data to shift the conversation about impact.
Trusting your data
In destination marketing, reliable data is non-negotiable. Zartico’s commitment to data integrity ensures that the insights you rely on are both accurate and actionable.
By investing in advanced data science and developing patent-pending methodologies — including hotspot filtering and normalization of geolocation and spending data — Zartico addresses inconsistencies commonly found in big data.
Our approach ensures your decisions are based on statistically valid and trustworthy information. In fact, this is only possible because we license data for all of North America — smaller, destination-only data sets don’t have sufficient volume to accurately balance the data across all dimensions.
We clearly indicate sample size diagnostics and leverage the largest commercially available data sets, providing sample sizes far larger than traditional research methods. Our focus on transactional data over human recall eliminates research bias, and our integrated data model and Place-Based Strategy offer a holistic view that no single source can achieve.
Building a peer community
Zartico understands the power of professional networking. Through initiatives like our annual Zarticon user conference, virtual events like Show + Tell, our CEO-led Leadership Forum, or case study-focused industry presentations, we’re fostering a community where destination marketers can connect, share, and learn from one another.
