We see you, small DMOs. You have just as many marketing pressures as larger destinations. But they have strength in numbers.
The good news: There’s strength in knowledge, too.
With a partner with vast experience in meetings, group sales, travel trade and sports, you gain the expertise to execute strategic marketing campaigns that hone in on suitable planners and groups that fit your destination’s meetings package.
See the solutions below that are achievable … even for your smaller DMO.
Provide a Strategic Approach with Limited Dollars
How do you align your destination organization’s goals with content that can be measured? It all starts with strategy. You can generate leads for your sales team, especially when you have the right strategy. It’s about leveraging your marketing dollars to ensure you’re reaching the right audience with the right message to drive results.
This means targeting the types of planners organizing events for groups that align with your destination product. We understand the unique nuances of attracting groups to your destination — like if you need to focus on specific segments for need times or focus on the shoulder seasons when group business is more desired.
When you work with Digital Edge, you gain a team of dedicated collaboration partners who can develop a strategy that’s tailored to your destination and your organization’s goals. Our team of experts becomes a resource for your team to support sales efforts and provide insights and direction. You gain 100+ years of collective meetings & group travel industry expertise. For 13 years, we’ve been speaking to meeting planners and sports organizers — and we know how to engage them throughout the planning cycle.
More Efficient Meetings Media
Meet planners wherever they roam online — outside of the traditional trade media outlets — with digital media strategies that position ads directly in front of them, ensuring maximum exposure and meaningful engagement.
It’s essential to have a cohesive approach to digital media — one that blends creativity with cutting-edge technologies, all finely tuned for optimal performance. Digital Edge is your partner in crafting highly targeted and efficient digital media strategies tailored to reach your specific audience of meeting planners with surgical precision. Our extensive knowledge and understanding of the different media platforms to reach planners in the different buying cycles saves your ad dollars.
Going beyond conventional methods, we delve deep into key industry verticals and employ an omnichannel strategy, utilizing multichannel and multidevice campaigns that leverage your own first-party data opportunities to effectively engage group audiences and reach users in all stages of their browsing journey.
Leverage Your Planner & First-Party Databases
Over the past decade (plus), we’ve worked to fine-tune our audience modeling using first-party data collected via research studies, relationships and opt-ins.
Digital Edge provides a digital approach that leverages your own first-party data opportunities. We do not share your database or list or solicit to the first-party data but use it to build larger audiences in our programmatic tools. We can guide you in utilizing your own data over the years and integrate it with display, retargeting, social, trade media and more to maximize your meetings marketing investment.
We can also drive opportunities from within your database of planners, identifying how contacts are tagged in your CRM for list management. This helps ensure every aspect of your meetings marketing email campaign is meticulously curated to drive conversions.
Make Your Meetings Site More Appealing
Your destination’s meeting marketing website should be planners’ go-to resource. Digital Edge prioritizes what content needs to be developed for your site to motivate planner users to engage deeper into your product offerings with thoughtfully written messaging, high-impact visuals and strong calls to action (CTAs).
On the creative side, we ensure your meetings marketing site has a look that resonates with planners, all while maintaining your brand identity. This allows your site to not only break through the clutter and leave a lasting impression on your audience but also have the functionality to create a seamless online experience and move planners down the sales funnel.
Tell Your Story to Drive Interest
Destination awareness doesn’t happen overnight, nor does a changed perception. But with a long-term term partnership with a solely B2B-focused agency (*cough* Digital Edge *cough*), you can tell your destination’s story to the right audience.
For example, VisitColumbusGA needed to distinguish itself from Columbus, Ohio, when speaking to meeting planners and telling them the story about Georgia’s second-largest city’s new hotel product and convention package. Through the partnership between the destination organization and Digital Edge, we were able to raise awareness, bolster RFPs and shift perceptions about Columbus, Georgia, as a meetings destination.
We specialize in crafting compelling narratives that speak directly to your audience, ensuring every aspect of our work — from voice and tone to messaging — is aligned with your brand’s vision and objectives. With content that drives strong storytelling around key destination initiatives and product offerings, you’ll be able to fuel engagement and interest at a deeper level.
Identify Your USP
A meetings marketing strategy helps find and promote your unique selling proposition (USP). What exactly is this, and how do you identify it? Your USP is what makes your destination stand out from your competitors. It builds a human connection. It inspires. And it should be included in your DMO’s content marketing.
Digital Edge uses your USP to guide strategic content planning and writing and show planners how your destination has what they need to plan an exceptional meeting or event.
Support Sales Activities with Marketing
The benefit of working with Digital Edge is experience bridging the gap between what sales needs and what marketing manages. This means on-brand marketing solutions for the group sales team and extra time for the marketing team to dedicate to additional priorities.
We can create an enhanced presence for sales via integrated marketing at key shows where significant investment is being made, maximizing your ROI. A sales activity program like this enhances visibility leading up to the show, at the show and afterward. It also makes the to-do list that much smaller for sales teams on the road, allowing them to foster relationships with prospects before and after the show and to concentrate on selling and networking at the show.
For example, Visit Rapid City’s regional meetings campaign aimed to grow group business by targeting planners in South Dakota and nearby states and encouraging them to take advantage of what they have in their backyard for meetings. We used a layered approach incorporating email marketing around Connect Marketplace 2023 in nearby Minneapolis, Minnesota, and geofencing to reach planners while they were on the phones during the event.
Another effective way to convert prospects: showing them your destination firsthand. Familiarization (FAM) tours help your sales team get booked business. Digital Edge’s Destination Experiential (FAM) program is designed to be a win-win, even if not every attending planner chooses the destination to host a future event. The program also provides your destination with key knowledge of planners’ perceptions prior to and after the experience, as well as resources to utilize in future meetings marketing efforts.
LinkedIn Sales Training
For sales team members looking to enhance their networking, there’s Digital Edge’s LinkedIn training. It was developed specifically for destination sales teams, empowering your sales force to be authoritative voices. This in-person session teaches and provides the tools for your sales team to utilize LinkedIn for social selling, leverage the platform’s database, grow and engage your network, source and qualify business, and use AI.
We can also update your destination organization’s profile to ensure the messaging resonates with planners and provide insights into sales team profile updates and recommendations.
If you don’t have the human power or time to meet the group sales & marketing needs of your smaller destination organization and win booked business, that’s where Digital Edge comes in. Reach out to see how we can work together.
