During a protracted recession, we were tasked with destination marketing for a leading visitor attraction. Whilst people tend to holiday more at home when money’s tight, our challenge was to outperform strong competition to win increasing footfall and raise secondary spending on site.
WTWS was engaged to augment the client’s existing marketing team, to conduct market research and define a marketing strategy to drive long term revenue and profit growth.
Existing marketing plans were built on anecdotal perceptions of the target market, so we undertook a comprehensive situation analysis to clarify the organisation’s actual market and positioning.
Primary research explored visitor demographics and expectations, while a competitive analysis examined choices facing incoming tourists and locally based visitors.
A thorough review of the organisation’s multiple revenue streams, with an analysis of the data, revealed plentiful opportunities to grow short-term revenues and lifetime customer value.
Demographic profiling of visitors uncovered unexpected information, overturning previous marketing assumptions. Offerings onsite were realigned and delivered a subsequent increase in visitors’ secondary spending.
With highly seasonal revenues, it’s tempting to invest in growing off-season income to ease cash flow. However, our research showed that a far greater ROI would be achieved by concentrating efforts on and around high-season peaks.
Finally, we gained further significant increases in revenue from segmenting customers by location to raise lifetime value of both local visitors and tourists.
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