We use our travel guide to tackle the need to position Lake County and our attractions as an attractive, diverse location that is an excellent destination for a weekend getaway or overnight trip. The Remarkable Lake County, OH travel guide was redesigned from cover to cover in 2022 based upon reviews of other award-winning visitors guides and travel magazines. Highlighting our 2022 travel guide was a beautiful cover photo of a couple enjoying wine in the vineyards at Cask 307 winery, with the photo taken by our own Trista Wright, the full-time Creative Director and Graphic Designer for Remarkable Lake County.
Inside the guide, we started transitioning many of our advertisers from their more “traditional” advertisements, which were often text-heavy or featured low-resolution graphics, to more of a photo-focused ad so the advertisements appear more professional and flow with the look of the guide. Initially, we were apprehensive about this transition for fear of losing advertisers, but an overwhelming majority of our partners loved this idea and were open to creating ads to fit this format.
Our travel guide is the primary print marketing piece that we produce to generate interest in the area and a goal of driving traffic to the website after someone receives a guide. Due to the demand and success of our travel guides over the past two years, we’ve increased the distribution of our guides from 60,000 in 2019 to over 100,000 in 2022.
We take a proactive, targeted approach to our guide distribution to get our guides in the hands of as many would-be visitors in the markets where we focus our advertising. We work with Ohio Magazine, Buffalo Spree Magazine, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Columbus Dispatch, Erie Times News, and The Morning Journal to proactively send our guides to the zip codes in those markets that most closely mirror our target demographics for travelers. As an example of the success of this direct mailing, this year, we sent guides to Columbus, Erie, and Pittsburgh the week of May 23. Here’s a look at website visitors during the two-week window following the guide distribution, May 25 to June 9, in 2021 versus 2022.
2021
Total website users: 2726
New website users: 2582
2022
Total website users: 5158 (increase of 89%)
New website users: 5041 (increase of 95%)
While not our main goal for the travel guide, ad sales and revenue from the guide are secondary goals with this publication. As mentioned previously, with the change to the new ad format, we were able to convert nearly every ad to fit our new format and sell more ads (17 new ads in 2022) which generated a nearly 14% increase in revenue.
