Guest Post: Death of the One-Size-Fits-All Website Home Page

Have you ever been to Liberty, North Carolina?

Think of Liberty as a pretty, small coastal town with wide appeal for its fresh seafood, boating and outdoor activities, destination wedding venues, conferences, and executive retreats.

Last year, however, the destination had zero visitors — because it’s fictional. Visit Liberty was created by Bound (formerly Get Smart Content) to illustrate how DMOs can take a strategic crawl, walk, run approach to personalizing their website, from simple location-based messaging to more advanced, persona targeting that matches a visitor’s interests.

The Travel Vertical talked to Adriana Escalante, Customer Success Manager, and Leigh Brown, Marketing Coordinator, at Bound in Austin about the infographic that supports the company’s latest report: “The 2017 State of Personalization for Destination Marketers,” which provides a few real destination examples of personalization.

• Q: Can you point to a DMO using geo-targeting in action?
• A: Yes, Visit Grapevine (TX) served a targeted drive market with an overlay campaign featuring a CTA for a time-sensitive ticketed local event, achieving 873% year-over-year increase in first-day ticket sales.

• Q: How about  a media campaign that works with a different kind of segmentation?
• A: Visit Franklin runs a paid media campaign that targets three audience segments by interest: music, family activities, and history and heritage, serving up personalized CrowdRiff-sourced UGC content.

• Q: What trends has the study identified for future applications of website personalization?
• A: We’re excited about destinations positioning themselves as a place of business, targeting a whole other segment: meeting planners.

• Q: What trends has the study identified for future applications of website personalization?
• A: We’re excited about destinations positioning themselves as a place of business, targeting a whole other key segment: meeting planners. If your web visitor is a meeting planner looking to book a corporate event, it’s important that they can easily identify why your destination is well-suited to make their event a success. In this instance, a DMO’s goal is to see an increase in RFPs. We’re also seeing DMOs get the most engagement out of video content by serving it to the appropriate web audience. When you’ve invested in curated topic videos, you want to make sure the intended audience is seeing it.

To see the Bound infographic and report on personalization, click here.