Visit Tucson Marketing “Experiment” Returns Big Website Metrics
Tourism in Arizona is booming. In 2018, the state hosted a record number of visitors (45.4 million) and spending reached a record amount ($24.4 billion). 6.8 million of these visitors ventured to Tucson and Southern Arizona, which was up almost 5% from the previous year.
Much of this success can be credited to the Visit Tucson DMO, whose primary goal is to engage travelers with the “Free Yourself” brand and to inspire them to experience everything metro Tucson and Southern Arizona have to offer. Leading the Marketing team is Lee McLaughlin, VP of Marketing, who knows how important the VisitTucson.org website is to converting digital visitors to physical ones.
Results-Oriented Objectives
Lee and his team are always thinking about how to keep potential visitors on the website longer and how the site can also be a resource to visitors once they are in town. Knowing the value of continuously innovating, Lee initially saw VAMONDE as an intriguing “low-cost experiment” worth trying. He developed a pilot to test three core goals:
- Delight members and trim marketing costs — Metro Tucson’s attractions are the experiences that visitors travel for, yet gathering the content to market these members is a constant challenge for the Visit Tucson team. Lee’s goal was to provide VAMONDE as a powerful membership benefit that provides free technology for members to use to share their experiential stories. This results in the DMO getting better content at low to no cost.
- Reach new visitors and guide in-destination guests — Growing an audience and avoiding the expenses (and pain) of a proprietary app while delivering a digital visitor guide is no small task. Lee’s team created ten local itineraries and digital interactive guides to highlight top things to do that draw in new visitors and continue to provide an improved in-destination experience once they arrive.
- Experiential itineraries that enhance VisitTucson.org — In 2018 Lee’s team lead a 6% increase in time-on-page and a 2% decrease in bounce rate across their website. These results showed them the value that immersive and experiential content has on website user experience. They continued to expand on this by adding the digital guides to their own website using VAMONDE and resulting in 2+ minutes of engagement with local things to do.
The Road to Results
The approach to this “experiment” was simple. Take popular content from the Visit Tucson website and publish on VAMONDE to test how it performed as evergreen guides they can use continually or seasonally each year. By using VAMONDE’s platform instead of their own, they could lower the risk of experimenting while getting new concepts to market faster.
Six months later, Visit Tucson integrated this content directly on its own website, where they now showcase member-created stories to potential visitors in a fully interactive manner. This has resulted in seven new immersive itineraries at no cost to Visit Tucson. By combining member-created guides with their own, Visit Tucson added 34 rich content pages to their website, without designing or coding. Of these pages, 85% resulted in a 0% bounce rate the remaining 15% have an average bounce rate of 67%.
These initial results validate Lee’s “experiment” with trying VAMONDE. Visit Tucson plans to expand the number of participating member organizations while growing the presence of member-generated content on its website. The VAMONDE platform’s analytics provided the marketing team with deep visitor data, insights, and behaviors they can easily share with internal Visit Tucson stakeholders and their members.
