Doing More With Less - Part 3
Strategies to help destinations and attractions get ahead
Still emerging from the shadow of the recent economic collapse, marketers of destinations, attractions and resorts still dealing with the anxiety and challenges of business declines. “With less media spend, less help from staffing, less time – it’s a good time to shore up the foundations of our marketing programs, and create some stability for ourselves,” said Patrick Reilly, EVP Planning and Research at Wanderlust. “One of the best antidotes to this downturn is to generate some positive marketing results.”
A recent issue of the Wanderlust Report presented five important ideas to help your destination or attraction deal with a down economy, and make leaps when everyone else is crawling.
Tip #3: Get Your Message Right
We all know how valuable killer creative is for any marketing communications program, and how difficult it truly is to be different, relevant, and believable all at the same time. Solid creative strategy needs a clear, focused platform, solid pillars to support it, and a consistent voice, tone and visual identity that makes sense. In short, it has to have a “mood” that makes sense, and helps create an ownable and desirable position in the consumers mind.
With this platform in place, you’ll be able to throw out a lot of messages simply because they’re off-strategy or off-brand. You’ll also be able to create instantaneous consistency across all of your touch points, and develop easy to defend brand standards and guidelines, so that everything you do to market can benefit from the synergy that comes with integrated marketing communications.
Brand platforms also help you judge creative, copy and design in a very simple way. Rather than having your creative team generate a flurry of ideas and possibilities, they can focus their time and efforts on a much more narrow set of ideas, and help make the job of brand stewardship much, much easier for a marketing director. You’ll hear a lot less of “we’re all over the place,” and notice that things become much more consistently on-strategy.
“In our experience, it’s this concept that delivers the biggest bump in quality, and allows you to get a lot more out of your limited dollars,” said Reilly. “You’d be surprised what a relevant, well-crafted, consistent message can do to create desire, preference, and interest in your brand, and results for the CFO. You’ll burn through far fewer creative dollars when creative briefs are tighter, and your strategy clearer.”
Related content: Case Study: Howe Caverns Rebranding
Read more of 5 Keys to Doing More With Less in the Wanderlust Report, Volume 2, Number 2.
About Wanderlust
Wanderlust provides marketing and branding expertise to destinations, resorts and tourism attractions.
