We put storytelling at the centre of our Destination Marketing and Management Model. We’ve done this for a reason. It’s stories that persuade people, and we’ve been telling stories for a long time. A traditional ad tells a story. A TV spot tells a story. Newspaper articles tell a story. A Facebook post tells a story. A word of mouth recommendation is a story. Even an ad with price points tells a story. We’ve been telling each other travel stories since the Greeks.
In the last decade, we’ve moved our storytelling online, and the amount of stories that now exist has exploded. Even a single photo tells a story.
For a DMO, storytelling is critical. Destination marketing is creating your own stories in different formats, and for different platforms. It flows from the brand and DMOs are good at this. You hire the best photographers, shoot powerful B-roll and write compelling creative.
But this is not enough anymore. The internet is outnumbering you in stories about your destination. Your brand is being defined by others.
Motivating others to tell stories while enabling and encouraging them to do so it often better than telling stories yourself. People are more likely to get inspiration and information from other sources. But you can help enable this. Just like we’ve been working with travel writers and journalists for a long time.
On top of curating the stories told about you and amplifying the best, addressing the worst and learning from them and all others, has become a critical part of a DMO’s responsibility. It’s the modern equivalent of running a visitor centre or operating a call centre.
We’ll dive deeper into the details of this aspect and share specific activities and best practices that we observe in the marketplace. Stay tuned.
Next post in this series: The Destination Management and Marketing Model part 4: Experiences
Previous post in this series: The Destination Management and Marketing Model part 2: Assessment
We have created an assessment for destinations based on our model that shows priority areas for your organization’s development. Click here for more information and to establish a benchmark for your own destination.
I wrote this recently on the topic and why the local bloggers, videographers, photographers and instagrammers are so important to destination marketing and telling a destinations story.
https://medium.com/@dalebaldwin/the-importance-of-the-little-guy-f9079ebb92f9
Thanks for the comment Dale. And great post on medium. A lot of good points about storytelling, but also about storytellers, we’ll get to those in an upcoming post soon.