Millennial Travel Habits Force Tourism Bureaus to Shift Strategy

Millennials at destination marketing organizations are pushing senior leadership to develop more innovative digital communications and more experiential sales efforts targeting both the leisure travel and meetings sectors. Especially on the digital side, many of these younger professionals feel that their youth and social media expertise can be better leveraged to create more compelling social media and content marketing outreach for their organizations. For example, Jackie Spencer, 29, is the communications coordinator for meetings and conventions at Destination Cleveland. Earlier this year when the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team was heading into the NBA playoffs, she came up with a way for the DMO to both support the team and drive Cleveland's brand exposure to sports audiences nationwide. The Cavs had been using the popular Fatheads "Bighead" styrofoam cutouts of the basketball players's faces at various games, so Spencer called the team and asked if she could borrow some of them. Then, she and her colleagues walked around downtown asking visitors and locals on the street to join in and pose with the Fatheads for group photos. Spencer's goal was to share the imagery on the DMO's leisure and meetings-specific social media channels, so the Cavs' avid fan base could reshare the photos in support of the team. "There hasn't always been a lot of thought around creative media for the meetings and conventions market, especially since Cleveland was without a convention center for so long," says Spencer. "I work closely with our senior marketing manager and our senior interactive media manager to put together integrated digital content packages that expand the reach of our meetings-specific Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn channels. The success of the Fatheads project paves the way for us to do more of these types of promotions, and it's an indicator that we are on to something." Overall, the more than 60 Cavs-related posts earned over 975,000 impressions on Facebook and Twitter while promoting Destination Cleveland's #ThisisCLE hashtag and the Cavs'