ONLINE STRATEGY
FOR A CVC / CVB

Online Strategy for
a CVB / CVC
We’ll cover a lot of ground
• Web Site
• Planning
• Banner (Display) Ads
• Email
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media

The Web Site:
Start with where they end

StJoMO.com
• Lots of photos
• Listings of Places to Stay
• Events and Other Things to Do
• Historical Interests of the Area
• Some Video

StJoMO.com
• The most important thing to do is keep
information current; always adding new
stories, listings and other information for
search engines to find and index

StJoMO.com
• Of our $25,000 let’s spend $2,000 with a
Search Engine Optimization company
• Changes a company may make include
changing page titles, adding search friendly
content, increasing keywords and content
keywords and making better in-page titling
and other code-level additions
$23k of $25k left

Next up…paid media
• Site is in a good place
• Before we start spending money with
publisher’s we’re going to do something far
more important:
– PLANNING

Planning
• Define goals and objectives
• Set target audience and demographic
profile
• Determine the action you want your user
to take & make sure that path is efficient
and works well

Planning
• Define goals and objectives
– Drive traffic
– Convert traveler’s from just ‘considering your destination’ to
‘why would they consider anywhere else?’
– Collect information and approval to continue the conversation
after they visit your site and destination
• Set target audience and demographic
– W 25 - 54
– IA, IL, AR, KY, TN, OK, NE, KS, IN
• Determine the action you want them to take on
your web site

Defining Your Audience:
Questions to ask yourself
• What are their interests?
• What are their expectations?
• What is important to them?

Defining Your Geographic
Target: Questions to ask
yourself
• Where are they located?
• What areas are within reach?
• How much can we spend to effectively
advertise to this area?

Reaching St. Joe’s Target
Audience
• Geo-targeting: Identifying a user’s location down to the
zip code or DMA so we can control where banner ads
appear
– Ad Networks are a good place to leverage this targeting method
• Contextual Advertising: Content on the site is interest
specific, such as travel (TripAdvisor, Virtual Tourist)
• Local Market Site (KansasCity.com)
• Interest-based Site: A site where the content is catered to
your target audience (iVillage.com)

Timing
We’re going to spend $15,000 on display
placements over a three and a half month
period. What will it look like?

Sample StJoMO.com Ad Buy

Other Things to
Remember
- Aim for ATF (above the fold)
- Target popular sections of the publisher’s website
where possible, but also keep ROS (run of site) in
mind
- Focus on strong ad units like the 728x90,
160x600, and 300x250
$8k of $25k left

E-Mail
• With e-mail marketing we’re going to
spend $1,000 each on three different
messages for St. Joseph
• We’ll space them out by about a month
• Each message will focus on a couple key
events occurring over the summer months
St. Joseph
$5k of $25k left

Search Engine
Marketing
• Who Are the Players?
– Google
– Yahoo!
– MSN
$0 of $25k left

Search Engine
Marketing
• Spend our remaining $5000 over three and
a half months promoting events and special
festivals through a series of keyword
advertisements

Social Media
• Why are social media channels so effective?
– Being a part of something
– We learn a little about each other
– It provides us a channel to express our opinion
– It gives us an audience who (we think) cares
– It’s so completely different from traditional
advertising channels

WE’RE IN THE HOME STRETCH.
HANG IN THERE

PLAN

EVALUATE

EXECUTE

OPTIMIZE
OPTIMIZE
OPTIMIZE

My contact info:
Jim Murphy
Hoffman | Lewis
E-mail: jmurphy@hoffmanlewis.com
This presentation will be on the MACVB site
as well as HLintheSTL.com