The goal of our visitors guide was to compile all of the fun, unique and Home.Grown.Great. experiences Miami County has to offer and share those with potential visitors. With this guide, it was important to us that we had features for each of the sections as well as other features sprinkled throughout. We would like our guide to have the feel of a magazine, not just listings, but still provide a visitor all they would need to know about the area. We chose specific paper for our visitor guide cover that had you moving it in your fingers when you first picked it up. People love the smooth, soft feel, commenting on it often. We’ve been doing professional photo shoots to elevate our visual content and have focused on having local people in our photos as much as possible.
One thing we’ve noticed recently is that many guides utilize multiples photos and have focused a lot on outdoor adventure with lots of blues and greens on the cover. We wanted to do something different that would make our guide stand out when it is in a rack with other guides. For ours, we featured friends enjoying our new courthouse plaza and fountain with the historic courthouse in the background. We feel taking the blue sky out made our guide pop among all the others and made our logo with Miami County really stand out in the crowd. Two of us from our office traveled to Texas in May for a sports tourism show. Our connecting flight was through Detroit. While in Detroit, we had the pleasure of seeing our guide in a rack among others. It is always great to see your product, a product you are so proud of being distributed in other markets, but this one really stood out. I’ve included a picture.
We typically distribute 50,000 copies of the guide over an 18-month period. These locations include, and are not limited to trade shows, travel inquiries, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan travel consumer areas, Miami County and Montgomery County, AAA distribution offices, Dayton and Cincy Magazine, stakeholders, partners and more. We base effectiveness off how many guides we distribute throughout the 18-month period. If the above-mentioned locations and people are asking for restocks, we consider this a success, meaning people are grabbing the guides and needing more. This current guide will be distributed through June 30, 2023, and we have already distributed 20% more guides this year than in previous years. Because of this, we may need to print additional copies of this guide or evaluate a 12-month visitor guide in the future.
We have done some digital advertising as well as a way of getting our guide out. We sent an email out with a link to our online version to our distribution list. We had an open rate of 34.1% and a CTR of 5.5%. We also ran an email marketing campaign through Quest Digital. Our email went to 33,000 emails and had 3,997 interactions with 907 clicks, 4% of these were to our visitor guide. Finally, we utilized our contract with Ohiotraveler.com to have our visitor guide accessible on that site. Ohiotraveler.com is in the top five sites sending us referrals to our website. View the guide here https://www.homegrowngreat.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/WEB-MCVCB-Guide-2022.pdf.
