3 Ways Visit Florida Taps Locals and Visitors to Be Brand Speakers

Last year, about 94% of the 94.3 million people who traveled to Florida were repeat visitors, and around 25% of them were coming to see friends and relatives. Armed with that data, Visit Florida developed three smart and cost-effective promotional campaigns over the last nine months, asking both Florida residents and out-of-state travelers to help promote the destination. Susannah Costello, VP, global brand for Visit Florida, spoke about those campaigns during the recent EyeforTravel Online Marketing conference in Miami, while offering a deeper dive into the psychology of storytelling in destination marketing. "Storytelling is a basic human need to create order and meaning out of what we do," said Costello. "As a brand, it is not the storytelling about us that matters. It is us using our brand to enable our brand advocates and visitors to story tell about themselves. So if you think about what a writer or a photographer or an artist does, they are making someone or something look brighter, better, smarter, funnier, right? Don't we all want to be funnier? Or the singer on The Voice? That's what brand advocate storytelling is about." Costello then provided the four takeaways