1. How Destinations Can
Boost Their Content
Marketing in 2014
A Strategic Marketing Group White Paper

2. The art of creating buy-in over the hard sell is making its way
through the DMO sales community . . . .
Jeremy Fairly, 10 Things to Look Out for in 2014 Destination Marketing
Destination Marketing International 12/31/2013
While consumers continue to tune out traditional, intrusive
marketing communications, they increasingly crave the type of
genuine, customer–focused information that content
marketing delivers.
Jayson DeMers, Forbes 10/8/2013

3. Content Marketing Challenges
• There is the challenge of creativity. Creating content that is
relevant to your customers and makes your destination stand
out in new, exciting ways takes a constant supply of fresh,
innovative creative ideas.
• There is the challenge of dynamic change. Not only are
changing technologies and different channels involved, but the
DMO sales process itself is evolving. The hard sell is out. The
soft sell–with customer-focused, value-rich information–is in and
quickly becoming the new norm.

4. Content Marketing Tips for DMOs
• If your DMO’s content marketing isn’t happening, isn’t working,
or just needs a lift, what will you do in 2014?
• The following are some suggested actions you can take that are
essential to creating content marketing lift, closing the door on
discouragement, and positioning your destination’s digital
marketing for improved productivity in your destination’s sales
life cycle process:
•
•
•
•
•
Change or modify your DMO’s customer view
Make customer relationships strategic
Craft customer personas and profiles
Analyze customer brand journeys
Study your customer’s perception of “relevance”

5. Part 1:
Change or Modify Your DMO’s
Customer View
To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies
must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing
customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands
subservient to long-term customer relationships.
Rust, Moorman, Bhalla
Harvard Business Review, 2011

6. How do you, your marketing team and
entire DMO view your customers?
• Are they seen as mostly as faceless sales, a low transactional
view, or as human beings and valuable long-term customer
relationships–a high relational view?
• Does your DMO tend to think of customers primarily as
consumers, or as co-creators of what makes your destination
and DMO great?

7. High Customer View’s Impact
• A high customer view encourages caring. Caring impacts
relevance and quality, and relevance and quality impact
customer’s experiences and choices.
• A way to boost your destination’s content marketing is
organically related and flows from your DMO’s customer view.
It’s called customer intimacy.

8. Part 2:
Make Customer Relationships
Strategic
Companies that excel in customer intimacy
combine detailed customer knowledge with operational flexibility
so they respond quickly to almost any need,
from customizing a product to fulfilling special requests. As a
consequence, these companies engender tremendous customer
loyalty.
Treace and Wiersma
Harvard Business Review, 1993

9. Customer Intimacy
• The term customer intimacy may sound new, because it is not
commonly used in the DMO marketing community, but it has
existed in wider marketing circles, at least since Michael Treace
and Fred Wiersma introduced the phrase over 20 years ago.
• Their essential idea regarding customer intimacy was that it
was necessary to stop viewing sales transactions as standalone events and move to a longer-term relationship view
of sales. This long-term view of sales relationships would be
characterized by more particular knowledge of customers.

10. Priority and Goal
• To add lift to your content marketing results in 2014, make
customer relationships high priority and customer intimacy
your goal.
• If you haven’t already, start thinking of your different marketing
communication channels as different customer intimacy
channels for you to capture and continuously expand
knowledge of your customers. There are plenty of online and
digital tools to help you do this as well.
• In addition to maintaining a high customer view, creating and
applying customer intimacy insights to your DMO’s content
creation process, developing and applying customer personas
and profiles can help increase your content marketing

11. Part 3:
Craft Customer Personas and Profiles
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen .
Ernest Hemingway

12. Customer Personas and Profiles
• A customer persona is a grouping of customers based on
certain shared attributes. “Summer Campers,” “Fall Lovers,”
“Winter Skiers” and “Spring Walkers” might be an alpine
destination’s typical customer persona set, for example.
• A customer profile breaks a persona down into more
particular details. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to analyze
a persona. There are as many ways to organize customer’s
profiles as there are marketers.

13. Organize your
customer data into an
customer persona and
profile chart to make it
easy to access and
use.

14. Translate Insights Into Relevant
Content
• As customer information and intimacy grows, your ideal
customer personas and profiles chart can change too.
• The more content that is produced around your ideal customer’s
problems and interests listed in your chart, which is grounded in
objective customer data, the more power your content will
have to break through the marketing noise, get heard and
motivate your ideal customers to profitably act in your
destination’s favor.

15. Part 4:
Analyze Customer Brand Journeys
Movies that encourage empathy are more
effective than those that objectify problems.
Roger Ebert

16. Customer Brand Journeys
• A destination’s content marketing should do far more than serve
up objective information, facts and figures to its customers.
• Content that mostly objectifies your destination is boring.
While it may be interesting to city hall, hospitality, entertainment
and shopping venues it tends to make your destination invisible
to potential visitors and customers. It makes competing
destinations seem better.
• So, how can your content marketing and creative team develop
more customer empathy and effective marketing content in
2014? A solution is to create a framework that provides
perspective and meaningful insights into your different
customer’s experiences with your brand.

17. Customer Brand Journeys
• The result of this is content that “speaks” more to your
customers. It makes them feel like you personally know them and
their interests. It builds customer’s confidence that your DMO is able
to guide them to what they need in order to have a great time at your
destination.
• Some visitor segments are highly sensitive to misspending their
dollars, especially with the economy today. So this perception of
confidence and trust in your DMO is key to building prepurchase motivation.
• Customer empathy is a powerful tool in your content marketing
toolbox. A final suggestion to create more content marketing lift
in 2014 is to consider what relevant means to your customers.
Capturing insights from customer perceptions, and then applying
them to your content marketing production process, will help drive
customer responses and conversions higher.

18. Part 5:
Study Customer’s Perceptions of
“Relevance”
If your social content isn’t relevant, it’s just noise.

19. Relevance
• A final matter to consider when your content marketing isn’t
producing the results you hope for is whether or not your
thinking about what your customers find “relevant” is
broad enough.
• An overly narrow perspective of customer’s perception of
relevance can lead to missed opportunities of creating higher
quality content that can potentially generate higher content
marketing lift.
• The important distinctions for DMO executives to remember
are, 1) Not all content value is of equal worth to the customer,
and 2) Content value is calculated in the eyes of the
customer, not the DMO.

20. Conclusion:
Finding Content Marketing Success in
2014
The new role for the DMOs is that of content developer and
curator, reaching into the destination to find and share
interesting and authentic content that inspires. Those
destinations that understand this shift and take advantage of it
will be winners.
Carl Ribaudo, SMG

21. Conclusion
• This paper’s focus has been to highlight 5 action steps DMO
leaders can take to positively impact their content
marketing:
•
•
•
•
•
Change or modify the DMO’s customer view
Make customer relationships strategic
Craft customer personas and profiles
Analyze customer brand journeys
Study customer’s perception of “relevance”
• Implementing these 5 steps can help your DMO execute and
achieve the content marketing lift you’re looking for in a
more targeted and strategic manner.

22. For more information on SMG or to obtain a copy of
this white paper please visit
smgonline.net/freebies/white-papers/
Solutions for your competitive world.