Growing Los Angeles’ Meetings & Conventions Business

By Kerrie Yancey & Colette DuChanois

Los Angeles is the Capital of Creativity, so it took an extra edge to elevate this Tier 1 destination’s group business. A collaboration with Digital Edge has helped evolve the Southern California city’s brand messaging and apply it to its B2B audience.

Here’s LA’s story with Digital Edge.

Increased Productivity for the Meet LA Team

Evolved Messaging Alignment With LA’s B2C Markets

Strategically Position LA to Its Key Audiences

The Challenges

Meet LA — the sales and marketing team for LA’s meetings & conventions sector — needed:

An agency focused on the sales team’s needs
Marketing support for the sales team in alignment with the brand
To grow specific vertical markets, support for the citywide team and separately from the in-house team
An agency that understands the trade media & strategic partnering offerings and strategic partnership to utilize and manage them most effectively

To move to a digital approach that was more targeted, multichannel and present where planners are today
A content marketing approach
An agency to help them fully leverage its Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and create a strategy based on customer input
An overarching strategic approach that was thorough and measurable

Enter Stage Right: Digital Edge

We were looking to really make the most of our advertising dollars and for a creative partner who understood the meetings industry. We were spending too much time and energy having to educate agencies who didn’t have sufficient knowledge of the meeting planner audience and the meetings media landscape. A colleague recommended Digital Edge, and we were excited to finally meet an agency that got it right away.

Darren Green

Senior VP of Sales LA Tourism

The Solutions

Meet LA partnered with Digital Edge in 2020. But we all remember what started that year: the pandemic. As one of the most globally well-known destinations, LA is celebrated as an exciting, creative and welcoming place for visitors. But during that challenging time, even the region’s undeniable magnetism needed some stronger forces to inspire domestic travel from leisure and meetings & conventions. So, when most of the country was fresh out of lockdown, the LA team’s staff was significantly reduced, and the destination’s post-pandemic branding was making its debut; one of our tasks was helping Meet LA regain its group business momentum.

Digital Edge got to work with the Meet LA team and LA Tourism’s branding task force to understand the new brand fully. In addition, we gathered real-time sentiment and intel from the LA CAB and sales team. From this, we started developing a strategy adapted to planners’ and attendees’ needs.

Digital Edge set out to share LA’s comeback story and show meeting planners that the Capital of Creativity was open for meetings and ready to bring groups back together again. We created the companion message, “Plan Your Comeback,” and a tailored digital strategy to parallel LA’s consumer marketing timeline and resonate with meeting and event professionals.

Since then, our teams have continued to work together each year to evolve the marketing strategies and messaging. We created the campaign headline, “Flip the Script,” as a transition from the LA team’s “Plan Your Comeback” message – this was our nod to LA as the “Entertainment Capital of the World ” and encouraged planners to move forward and think differently.

The LA team then created a progressive campaign message that was as inviting as a call to action: “Now Playing.” As LA rolls out the red carpet to some of the biggest events in the world over the next decade, now is the time for planners and attendees to experience a destination unlike any other.

Working together, Meet LA and DE’s objectives are to:

Drive meeting planner awareness, engagement and interest
Build awareness for key vertical market segments
Provide marketing tools for the sales team to leverage
Drive visitation to the meetings website
Leverage industry partnerships

For our meetings integration, the messaging and content is focused around:

New developments and product in LA
Connectivity and the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
Unconventional venues
The Los Angeles Convention Center complex and Downtown LA
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
A variety of neighborhoods and properties
LA’s role as a talent and intellectual capital destination

The Meetings Campaign

Citywide

Entertainment Industry

Luxury MICE

Diversity

Incentive

Tech

"We knew we needed to keep the integrity of the destination’s branding and elevate it for the B2B side of things."

Kerrie Yancey | DIGITAL EDGE

Director of Content Marketing

The Deliverables

Brand Consulting

Creative

Sales Activity Marketing Support

CAB Strategy

Media Management

Strategic & Third-Party Partnerships

Content Marketing

Email Marketing

Video Marketing

The Results

The unifying efforts between leisure and group marketing have allowed all teams to create a cohesive experience between the B2C and B2B audiences — a natural overlap that can easily happen in a city full of possibilities.

The LA sales team has a strong digital presence backing its efforts and has kept busy with group interest and RFPs for future business. The team reports seeing record-high lead volume for new group business.

“We truly collaborated with the marketing team, the sales team and the customer advisory board to bring the new brand and marketing to life. Now, I feel like a part of the LA team, and I hope they feel like a part of Digital Edge’s team. The relationship has only grown and continues to be fulfilling and challenging as we develop new ideas and strategies to drive business.”

MYa Surrency | DIGITAL EDGE

Co-Founder

By-the-Numbers

Meet LA Site
(January 1-December 31, 2023)

↑ 1,092% YoY

0 K Sessions

↑ 1,063% YoY

0 K New Users

Ready to gain an original resource for your city’s meetings and conventions focus by working with people who bridge the sales and marketing gap, create trust, identify the real problems your travel & tourism organization is trying to solve and implement cutting-edge marketing strategies and innovative solutions to drive group business? Let’s work together.