Marketing, Branding and Communications

Your brand is the image and related emotion your destination triggers in the traveler.  Think San Francisco, Paris, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Rome – these are all well-branded destinations.

Your brand is also a promise that your image truly represents the visitor experience.

TEI specializes in research-based branding – assessing your strong points, testing potential images or slogans, and recommending a powerful, authentic brand for your destination.

Marketing and Branding

Our marketing carries your brand directly to the soul of travelers.  In developing a marketing strategy for your destination:

• We develop targeted advertising that builds on your brand and encourages travel, especially when it is most needed.  We specialize in improving shoulder and off seasons
• We create entertaining, shareable social media campaigns to reach influencers and everyone who enjoys sharing their travels. Digital word of mouth is one of the most powerful brand advertisements around
• We emphasize selectively curated data and technology to engage repeat visitors and those making inquiries
• We recommend developing or expanding local festivals and events that can become your ‘signature’ and align organically with your brand. We suggest promotional campaigns that wed your brand with your events
• NEW!  Our marketing, event planning and messaging links your destination with an emerging travel trend – visitors seeking a deeper connection while minimizing their environmental impact

Communications

Your communications approach needs to cover a lot of ground:  keeping stakeholders involved and contributing, trumpeting your successes, building good will for times when crisis strikes, creating a powerful media network to report on and promote your destination, winning ongoing resident support by messaging tourism’s positive impact on their lives, local economy and more.

With our comprehensive communications planning, you will be able to:

• Enhance local media relationships to help reporters develop interesting, relevant tourism-related stories
• Target customized newsletters that speak to the interests of different groups, such as hoteliers, elected officials, residents and volunteers
• Use technology to initiate news stories, track coverage and identify media contacts
• Use news releases to start conversations and build media relationships around the US
• Leverage social media to spread the word on key developments – serving as your own online news source
• Maximize online tools and public presentations to keep stakeholders up to date – and to be sure you are in touch with community attitudes
• Strategies to engage and inform ‘anti tourism’ groups to improve understanding
• Crisis communication planning