Thu, May 10, 2007
Reaching tourists is a critical component of any marketing and advertising strategy for live entertainment productions. While the Internet has opened up a variety of channels to reach them, it’s still a difficult task to accomplish on a typical production budget. Over the past few months, we’ve begun seeing more and more very strong success stories of reaching tourists online for both Broadway and Las Vegas productions at a very strong ROI. Some campaigns were direct response oriented and ultimately sold thousands of tickets in a very short window. Others were awareness oriented and generated very high interaction rates seeding the consumer with an impression before arriving at their destination city.
There were also plenty of campaigns that we felt underperformed. The lesson we are learning through our testing is that you need to clearly identify the key variables that affect the type of tourist you are talking to, and then you must deliver both a message and an offering that clearly fits their needs. In other words, we are seeing the word ‘tourists’ as too broad of a category to target. We’ve been segmenting the tourist market and speaking to them in very different languages and setting different benchmarks of success based on projected user behavior. For example, one segment is the ‘planner’ who is researching what they are going to do. They are actively searching for airfare, hotel and entertainment – they want to be educated, not sold to. The ‘buyer’ is the person actively looking to book travel. They are looking for the best price and often need specific availability and are actively looking to purchase. In short, the statistics clearly back the theory that you need to segment the tourist market to match their projected behavior if you expect to successfully reach the tourism market.
With all of that said, here's some research that dives into behavioral trends. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority released the 2006 visitor profile. It’s a must-read for anyone doing business out there. I’m trying to find a link to one for updated NYC information but am not having much luck.
Click here to access the story (click on the 2006 Las Vegas Visitor Profile Study link)
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