No one knows quite like ad agencies, how important every single word can be. We give extensive thought to every word and phrase. We choose words carefully because what we’re writing has to be descriptive yet concise. It has to impress the reader even though we’re writing for a wide audience with differing levels of reading comprehension. We also consider pace, cadence and alliteration, especially if we’re writing a script that will be read by professional voice talent.

So far in Mikula-Harris’ 30 year history, our choice of words in an ad has not caused an international incident. That was not the case when Turkey recently launched a tourism campaign. To most Americans, the TurkAegean campaign seems harmless. It’s a made up word formed by combining two others, like advertorial or frenemy. Not to mention, Turkey’s west coast is on the eastern side of the Aegean Sea. In some parts of the world where centuries old disagreements exist, a single word can cause tension. The campaign stirred up old feelings about control of the Aegean.

Not only has Mikula-Harris avoided causing any geo-political tension, we actually helped ease some. Well, actually they’re more local, but still passionate positions that needed to be handled deftly. While doing a tourism branding project in West Virginia, we learned that the county that hired us had three distinct areas. One was the county seat where most of the local commerce was located. Another was an area known as the Lost River Valley. It’s a picturesque region with mountains, rolling farmland, and a few high-end B&Bs. The third was a small but growing town that was located on a busy road that a lot of visitors traveled on their way through this county to nearby ski resorts. In this small town, some local businesses had recently popped up using the name Lost River. That did not sit well with the purists in the Lost River Valley. It wasn’t truthful and genuine, they thought, since the town was literally on the other side of a mountain and thus not located in the valley. After assessing the big picture, we advised the client that visitors are not concerned with artificial boundaries like town or county lines and most certainly do not care about what constitutes a valley. We assured them all that with the town serving as a gateway to the Lost River Valley it genuinely helped support and promote the brand. We saw it as a win-win. A few months later at a wonderful dinner at one of those charming B&Bs, a group of local business owners from both the valley and the nearby town all dined together and actually raised a glass to toast Mikula-Harris as the peacemaker. All they needed was an outside expert with no pre-conceived bias, to point out that they’re stronger together. That branding work won some awards, yet the Nobel still eludes us.

In an episode of the great TV series The West Wing, a former staffer had written a tell-all book that included some stories that were totally fabricated. The media loved interviewing the author who gladly repeated his false claims on every show to sell more book. Most of the remaining White House staffers thought it was a minor story from a low-level assistant getting his 15 minutes of fame and thought the best course of action was to ignore it. One lone presidential advisor was outraged and wanted to fight back. He wanted to aggressively counter every false story with the facts and ruin the author’s credibility. Finally, near the end of the episode, the President asked the aide why he was so bothered by what everyone else thought was insignificant. He said, “I just don’t think we should be so cavalier with the truth.”

Brands, and those responsible for building brands, should feel the same way. Brands have to be built upon a foundation of truth. Destination branding is not the place to be aspirational. A community should not brand itself as the biggest and greatest of something simply because they have a long-term goal to achieve it years down the road. The general public will not hold back on sharing its thoughts on how the community doesn’t live up to what it claims to be. That’s a branding fail.

I don’t think it happens as much as it once did. By now most people know the importance of basing a brand strategy on good research. That’s only part of the story. Smaller untruths or exaggerations will nibble away at a brand’s credibility. We see it happen all the time. For example, every tourism office needs to mention their dining, shopping, arts and other things on its website and visitor guide. It’s in marketer’s DNA to want to enthusiastically sell their community’s assets. Just use caution with over-the-top claims about world-class this and epic that, and never say you have something for everyone. Save the superlatives for what your destination truly is the best at. Rest easy knowing it doesn’t have to be the best at everything. Before making a huge claim, ask “can we really deliver on this promise?” In other words, don’t be cavalier with the truth.

Lately, there is not much on the evening news that puts me in a good mood. This brief mention of tourism in Bath County, however, made our entire team happy. This is what we work for.

Bath County video from WDBJ7

This segment on WDBJ in Roanoke is just a brief update, but if it were a more in-depth examination of the post-pandemic tourism recovery in Bath County, what else might be included in the report?

It’s true there is pent up demand for travel and a lot of destinations are seeing visitors return. It’s also true that Bath County has amazing lodging properties that all have loyal repeat visitors who are likely itching to return to what they have missed for more than a year. If it seems like Bath County is slightly ahead of some (but not all) destinations, I for one will not be surprised. I don’t believe in coincidences.

  • During the pandemic when some destinations paused marketing, the county Office of Tourism proceeded with most of its planned advertising. The message was carefully crafted, but the objective was to remain top-of-mind when travel resumed.
  • The targeted advertising included 1.8 million impressions in print outlets; 3.1 million impressions on online outlets including websites and e-newsletters; 404,000 video impressions, including online pre-roll and streaming TV services.
  • Over the past 12 months, traffic to DiscoverBath.com was up 50% over the same period a year earlier. That followed a 57% between last year and the year before. Page views have more than doubled within two years.

Bath County tourism marketing was on the rise before the pandemic struck and brought travel to a complete stand still. We were confident at the time that the solid metrics of website traffic, visitor guide requests, newsletter opt-ins and social media followers combined with the decision to continue marketing through the downturn would all lead to a swift and robust recovery. We will not know economic impact numbers for quite a while, but early indicators suggest that we were correct.

The Mikula-Harris team is just getting started on a branding project for the Town of Appomattox, VA. It’s a cool small town located east of Lynchburg. The drive between our office in Vinton and Appomattox is especially wonderful because most of the miles are in Bedford County. Returning from a meeting recently, I was driving west on Route 460. Once past the congestion of Lynchburg, you begin to see the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. As the sun slowly sank on the horizon, I was reminded where the inspiration for the ad campaign “Where Ordinary Ends, Bedford Begins” came from as well as the line of ad copy “To the east and west are bustling cities, but in between is pure bliss.”

The message perfectly hits the nail right on the head for Bedford. We knew instinctively that the branding and creative work we did for Destination Bedford was gold. Now that some time has passed, we’re able to see that it’s helping move the needle. All of the newly branded campaign materials hit the street in early 2020. The website launched in March and traffic grew steadily all through the year. There were three times as many users and page views in April 2021 than during the same period in 2020.

What are the reasons for this success? As with most tourism marketing success stories, it’s not a single magic thing. It’s a combination of things:

• The new website follows all best practices for SEO. Result: Organic Search as a source of traffic is up 490%.

• Social media as a source of traffic is way up because the team at Destination Bedford is working hard at consistently posting quality content.

• The management and marketing team at Destination Bedford is investing its advertising budget in the right places — building brand awareness and generating website traffic.

The future looks bright for tourism growth in Bedford County. In the meantime, the present is pure bliss.

The combination of a strong brand and effective marketing are more important than ever as destinations emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. To be clear, it really mattered before the crisis hit. This situation has turned a lot of things about life in America completely upside down, but it has actually clarified the role of brands and marketing. The good news — for some destinations — is that destinations that have a solid foundation of good branding and marketing are in a position to recover faster.

Keep in mind that a strong brand and excellent marketing are related but definitely distinct things.

• A destination’s brand is what people think of the place whenever they are reminded of it. It’s a set of emotions. It can’t be completely controlled but it can be strongly influenced. What makes a branding effort successful is understanding what makes a place special and using every opportunity to portray it truthfully to the public.

• Marketing is heavily influenced by the brand strategy. At a bare minimum, it steers the message so that it speaks about the destination’s strengths in a way that appeals to the most likely target audience. Ideally, everything about the marketing is creative and professional. Plus, the marketing plan should be balanced and robust. It’s building brand awareness and engaging people all the time in as many ways as possible. Marketing is the necessary hard work — the muscle, if you will — that pushes the brand in front of people.

Why do we say that both are more important than ever as we emerge from the coronavirus disaster?

There are well-know benefits to having a strong brand, including:
Recognition and recall — That will be helpful as consumers have been temporarily focused on other things, like childcare, working from home, providing their family with the basic necessities.
Trust — It’s earned over time by being honest, consistent and familiar to consumers

The benefits of investing in high-quality, aggressive marketing are:
 – Awareness — Which is typically considered the first level of the marketing funnel. The simple truth is, having more consumers in any stage of the marketing funnel puts a destination in a better, competitive position to convert them to visitors quickly when people begin traveling again.

As a refresher, you might want to take a quick look at the previous blog post. It summarizes some of the recent successes with Bath County Tourism, including a nearly 40% increase in web traffic over the same period a year earlier. Plus, we launched a couple of new initiatives including a Motorcycle Rides & Scenic Drives brochure and a consumer e-newsletter to people whose information we had been capturing via the website. Today, we’re going to share with you how we were able to accomplish these successes in a short period on a modest budget.

Set Goals — Without them it’s easy to get distracted and begin rationalizing how other things deserve your attention not to mention your limited marketing money. Once you have set your goals, devise tactics and a media plan to achieve them. Stay focused.

Create a Balanced Media Plan — There is no absolute right answer to the vexing question of what percentage of a media budget should go toward online vs print vs broadcast vs other methods. One thing we know, anyone who says to go all in 100% with just one outlet is a fool. In the case of Bath County, since increasing web traffic was a major goal, we purposefully created a media plan with significant investment in online options, including a foundation of SEM and Google Display advertising. Whenever applicable, we negotiated packages with print media publications to include advertising on their website and in their highly targeted e-newsletters.

Invest in Quality Creative — One of the great conundrums of destination marketing is that small, rural destinations need the highest caliber marketing materials even though they have the smallest budgets. Average destinations are a dime a dozen. In order to compete, the smaller ones have to stand out and make people say “wow.” That’s accomplished with professional creative work. In our opinion, it’s not worth the cost of buying an ad in a media outlet if the ad is low quality. It will hurt the brand not grow it. Make quality a priority.

Be Selective. Be Decisive. Be Bold — In previous posts we talked about launching the Motorcycle Rides & Scenic Drives brochure, a consumer e-newsletter and making a concerted effort to build the county’s reputation for world-class fishing. Early indications are that all of these are yielding results. We knew from the beginning that these would all require effort and money in the future. We could have come up with at least a half-dozen other projects but we chose these based on research and experience. Any niche initiative — wine and beer trails are popular examples — requires funding in every fiscal year not just the first one. “If you build it they will come” only works in the movies. A trail or other program is an attraction like a shop or museum and it needs to be marketed continuously. Once we settled on these projects because of their potential for success, we committed adequate marketing funds to each of them.

Harness Social Media — Even before Mikula-Harris began its partnership with the county, the office of tourism in Bath County had embraced social media. The official tourism Facebook account has twice as many followers as there are residents in Bath County. We’re now using that strength to achieve our goals. We’re sharing quality content, engaging our fans, and driving traffic to the website. It’s a powerful marketing tool that can reach a large audience with a small investment.

Keep the Main Thing The Main Thing — Before spending money on media, initiatives, projects or partnerships, we asked the question, “Will this advance our goals and be good for the long term viability of the brand?” If it doesn’t check both boxes, perhaps the money can be better spent on something else. Nothing is more important than the integrity of the brand.

One final note, the tourism businesses in Bath County, including lodging properties, shops, attractions and restaurants, have been extraordinary partners. They all understand the concept of a rising tide lifting all boats. All have been wonderfully supportive and generous. Because of them, 2020 is looking bright for Bath County tourism.

540.774.9932

6 Walnut Avenue • Vinton, Virginia 24179

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