Destination Marketing: Targeting the Right Audience

Before you can define what, in your specific context, the “right audience” means for your destination, it’s important to clarify what challenges you are aiming to address and how improving audience segmentation can help.

What is the reason for your destination wanting to be more conscious of the kinds of travellers you target? What challenges and issues is your destination experiencing related to the current groups of visitors? What change are you seeking to achieve by changing the way you target different visitor segments?

Your answers to these questions will be key to understanding and specifying your “why”, so that your strategy is grounded on a clear definition of your current challenges and needs (not just the vague and generic idea that you need to “attract the right kind of visitors to address overtourism”).  

It’s clear that all destinations want visitors who support the local economy and who do not behave irresponsibly. This often leads to the idea of targeting “high net-worth individuals”. While targeting wealthy travellers may indeed be a suitable strategy for some experiences, it’s important to understand that more money does not automatically equal more local benefits.

Considering the overall aim of maximising benefits for local communities, destinations need to understand not only the income but also the costs, including the “invisible burden” of tourism such as environmental costs and resource consumption.

So instead of just focusing on the amount someone may spend when travelling, what might be some other ways of describing your ideal visitor whose spending patterns are more likely to benefit the local economy, spreading the benefits across different areas of local needs?  

Key to answering this question may be thinking beyond WHO your ideal visitor is (e.g. “high net-worth individuals”) and focusing more on HOW your ideal visitor chooses to travel. Rather than focusing only on the economic impacts of visitor spending, it's important for destinations to identify and target those that are likely to appreciate their values and act responsibly.

Destinations should utilise available marketing channels to target the "right" audience (i.e. those that fit the key management objectives that the destination has defined). So what are some traits or tendencies that we’d like to see in our visitors, from the perspective of our sustainable destination management aims?

If your destination is experiencing pressure and negative impacts from overcrowding in your most popular areas and most iconic attractions, your marketing strategy should be adjusted to redirect focus from your most visited places. For example, 

• Repeat visitors who are more likely to seek out local experiences beyond the most famous sites.
• Special interest groups with deep appreciation of the history and culture of your place and are focused on learning, as well as enjoying and appreciating what your destination has to offer.
• People with special cultural connections with the place (e.g. those from the diaspora community).

Similarly, encouraging longer stays and slower travel is a great way to shift the pressure you may have in already well-visited areas, as those who stay longer will most likely branch out rather than repeatedly visiting the famous attractions.

In order for the destination to be able to implement effective marketing approaches, you also need strategic approaches to product development, investing in suitable local opportunities that support the aims of effectively managing visitor flows, and extending the length of stay.

Some specific tactics may include:

• Supporting the development of experiences with overnight stays.
• Focusing on and enabling itinerary designs that complement the aims of promoting longer stays and slower travel (e.g. trails, loops).
• Offering transport options and incentive programs to make longer stays easier to plan for travellers.

One of the leading causes of visitor management-related challenges and (what is often referred to as) “overtourism” issues is how visitors behave. Entitled, disrespectful and inconsiderate attitudes among visitors are often what drives local residents’ dissatisfaction with tourism.

As such, an important goal for product development efforts is to support opportunities for positive visitor engagement and education. For example:

• A destination-level awareness campaign with positive messages highlighting local values.
• Relevant materials that businesses can use as part of their customer communications.
• Funding for local initiatives that facilitate positive connections between visitors and residents.

And what does this all mean in terms of actual steps destinations need to take?

In terms of specific marketing approaches, destinations can use what they have in place in terms of marketing intelligence (or if needed seek out external partnerships to gather and use relevant data), and use such knowledge to better inform decisions on marketing, advertising, and media budget allocation in line with key sustainable destination management objectives. For example, rather than advertising the destination year-round, strategically focus your advertising spend to promote visitation during the off-peak season.

Strategically allocating your marketing and advertising budgets also involves decisions on where NOT to spend money (“de-marketing”), for example, stop advertising related to certain areas that are already experiencing overcrowding, and shift promotional efforts from well-visited periods to less-visited times of the year.
 
Destinations can also re-invest some of the diverted marketing budgets to strengthen their low-season offers, for example through grant programs supporting local stakeholders working on innovative product ideas and alternative experiences encouraging visitation during low seasons.

Working with data is going to be a critical aspect of achieving destinations’ goals of targeting the “right” audience. And as with most things destination management, smart and data-based audience segmentation does not necessarily mean you need to pay a lot of money for new technologies and expensive services.

A good starting point is combing through the existing channels for collecting audience data and for reaching your desired audience groups. Such insights can be used to identify patterns in how your audiences interact with your content, and how different markets tend to respond to your marketing messages.

For smart targeting of relevant customer segments, the channels that destinations can leverage include:

• Social media and websites for marketing content highlighting the values that are in line with the destination’s sustainability management aims.
• Interactive online platforms for promoting stories showing key qualities associated with your ideal visitor.
• Targeted advertising (e.g. social media ads) for sharing messages specifically aimed at groups that have multiple qualities of the desired audiences.
• Trade shows and other events for increasing your visibility focused on the relevant market segments.
• Trade partnerships (e.g. working with international operators, associations and other organisations with relevant each) for amplifying your messages targeted at your desired audiences.

In addition to re-thinking how you identify, target, reach and connect with your ideal audience, it’s important to re-think how you measure success in teams of your marketing efforts.

For example, what are some of the metrics you can use to measure how effectively your marketing efforts influence visitor intention and attitude? What are some of the alternative KPIs for your destination aligned with your sustainable management approach?

For example:

• Number of travellers reached via marketing campaigns specifically designed to them with experiences, locations, and stories that are NOT the most typical and well-known ones.
• Number of programs supporting local entrepreneurs to develop and successfully launch alternative products.
• Levels of seasonal variations in visitor volume at sites and attractions according to their current and projected visitation vs. capacity.   
• Percentage of tourism development funding going to low-season off-the-beaten-path experiences.
• Percentage of tourism marketing budget going to solutions supporting innovative visitor management goals.

By employing the right kinds of metrics to measure marketing success, destinations can focus on leveraging their potential rather than concentrating resources only on what is considered most attractive according to clichéd trends.