Visit Savannah, the official destination marketing organization for the Greater Savannah, Georgia, area, was facing many of the same challenges as its fellow tourism organizations.
Its goal was to "get heads in beds," but it didn’t know if its marketing efforts were actually attracting new visitors - and it couldn’t accurately measure the full impact of how much those visitors spent during their trips.
With tourism budgets getting tighter, it’s more important than ever to understand the impact of every marketing dollar. As Zeek Coleman, interactive marketing manager for Visit Savannah, explains, “We need to trust that we’re getting additional new people to visit, not the people that are already planning to come here.”
Visit Savannah was also trying to reach more sophisticated luxury travelers, who can be difficult to identify online.
Visit Savannah decided to work with Conversant to find the right people and offer them the right message. And, with Conversant’s Net Economic Impact (NEI) measurement solution, accurately measure the total results of their efforts.
Together, we approached a recent three‐month campaign with these best practices in mind.
1. Focus on real people (not cookies or devices)
Tourism boards and DMOs typically use cookies to message travelers. But only a comprehensive view of real individuals – actual people – will ultimately give you accurate insight into how each person spends across retail, tours, restaurants, etc., while they’re at your destination.
That’s why it’s best practice to identify and get a clear view of individual customers and their behavior across channels and devices, then use this information to deliver personalized marketing messaging.
Visit Savannah tapped into Conversant’s set of 200 million anonymized consumer profiles to find and message individuals across mobile and computer who belong to categories like Luxury Travelers, Outdoor Enthusiasts and Health and Wellness Enthusiasts, from selected feeder markets.
“Conversant isn’t going after cookies and devices, but actual people,” says Zeek. “Cross-device is a real thing, not just a term. …That’s a groundbreaking idea that we haven’t seen much in the tourism industry.”
2. Engage consumers across all their devices
Digital display is great for driving awareness, but video also has the power to showcase your destination’s unique differentiators in a compelling way.
It’s important to work with digital marketing partners that can optimize your campaign based on which format works best and in what patterns.
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For example, your team could find that showing two video ads to an individual and then following up with more display ads is the optimal media pattern.
Visit Savannah was able to drive awareness through personalized cross-device video, display messaging and unique creative messages.
According to Zeek, “Conversant’s ability to see consumers, allowing us to contact them consistently while eliminating waste, was what really set them apart from others in the space.”
3. Look beyond bookings
Tourism marketers often measure success through metrics like click-through rates, video completion rates and brochure downloads - but these are not tied to revenue.
It’s also common to measure ROI through airline or hotel bookings only, but this falls short in showing all the spending that was generated by your campaign.
Measuring the NEI through credit and debit card transaction data, Visit Savannah jumped beyond analyzing hotel and airline bookings alone to achieve a full understanding of how many visitors their marketing influenced, their top feeder markets, and how much visitors spent across key categories like restaurants, shops and gas stations.
“One of the things that really impresses me about the NEI report and the result of this campaign is my ability to tell key stakeholders exactly what we did, beyond our typical KPIs (bed tax),” says Zeek.
Results worth emulating
By implementing these key best practices and leading technology, Visit Savannah was not only able to reach new visitors, but also to accurately measure the economic impact of those visitors.
It saw an $133:1 return on ad spend (ROAS) with an investment of $182,000. For lodging alone, the ROAS was $21:1, which is double what they typically see.
Zeek explains: “In light of political pressures some of our peers have faced, this sort of reporting is essential to prove the impact of our work.
"It’s exciting to see how Conversant is pushing the envelope and helping answer questions for us post-campaign.”