Break Down Barriers: A Destination Marketer’s Guide
▼ Summary
– Ashley Judge oversees tourism marketing for Salem, balancing its historical significance with its identity as a major Halloween destination.
– She advocates for non-intrusive email marketing by using a friendly “Remember us?” approach to maintain audience connection without causing offense.
– Judge emphasizes removing customer barriers, such as promoting public transport to address parking shortages and fixing usability issues like poorly formatted PDFs.
– Destination Salem uses a persona-based quiz to categorize visitors and provide tailored recommendations while collecting valuable data on their interests.
– Judge measures marketing success through economic metrics like visitation and spending, while recognizing that creative storytelling drives visitor engagement and financial outcomes.
For destination marketers, balancing the demands of a historic town with its modern identity as a global Halloween hub presents unique challenges and opportunities. Ashley Judge, the executive director of Destination Salem, navigates this landscape by blending creative storytelling with practical problem-solving. Living on the same street as the famous Ropes Mansion from Hocus Pocus, she personally hands out 1,500 pieces of candy each Halloween, embodying the community spirit she promotes. Her background includes building an ecommerce gift shop, Always Fits, into a $10 million annual business before taking the helm at Destination Salem.
Judge champions the power of owned media, particularly email marketing, which she describes as an underrated tool for genuine connection. She advises marketers to adopt a friendly tone, asking subscribers, “Hi! Remember us?” rather than pushing aggressive sales pitches. This approach keeps the brand top-of-mind without alienating the audience. She suggests visualizing each message as something you would comfortably share with a close friend, ensuring communications feel personal and unintrusive.
Another core principle Judge emphasizes is removing barriers that hinder the visitor experience. Faced with the reality of over one million annual visitors and only 3,000 parking spaces, her team launched a campaign encouraging public transit use, featuring local street performers to make the journey part of the adventure. She stresses that identifying and solving customer pain points, like correcting a poorly formatted PDF pamphlet, can significantly boost conversion rates. Collaborating with sales and customer service teams often reveals these hidden obstacles.
Letting your audience define themselves through interactive tools is another strategy Judge employs. Destination Salem uses a playful, Cosmo-style quiz to categorize visitors into personas such as “Muggles Seeking Magic” or “Cultural Connoisseur.” This not only helps tailor personalized itineraries but also serves as a valuable data collection method. Understanding visitor motivations allows for more targeted and effective marketing, moving from broad outreach to specific recommendations that resonate.
When it comes to justifying marketing investments, Judge bridges creative brand-building with measurable outcomes. She tracks key metrics like visitation numbers, spending patterns, and local tax revenue to demonstrate economic impact. However, she believes the magic lies in storytelling, crafting narratives that captivate people’s imaginations and inspire them to visit. The financial results naturally follow successful creative campaigns.
A question posed to Judge focused on linking intangible brand value to tangible financial returns for stakeholders. She responded that in destination marketing, the balance lies between data and fantasy. While they meticulously measure economic indicators, the initial draw comes from emotionally engaging stories that make a place irresistible.
Looking ahead, Judge turns the tables by asking what initiatives other teams pursue purely out of love for their users, independent of metrics or growth goals. This reflects her belief that sometimes the most meaningful efforts arise from genuine care rather than strategic calculation.
(Source: HubSpot Marketing Blog)