Chances are a Chicago suburb isn't at the top of anyone's vacation wish list. The Rockford Area Convention and Visitors Bureau would like to change that.
The Illinois group has been working with consumer segmentation firm Cohorts since last fall to sort out its potential visitor base and get a better idea of the audiences to target with an integrated program of direct mail, radio, print and online promotions.
RACVB president/CEO David Preece joined the organization about a year ago. “Frankly, Rockford was not on my radar either,” he admits. “But when I started to learn more about it, I was impressed with the visitor product that was here, given the size of the market.”
He describes Rockford as primarily a drive market, drawing visitors mostly from a three-hour radius. Local tourism consists of leisure travelers and big groups. The latter are primarily those who attend amateur sports tournaments and events (everything from baseball and basketball to volleyball and BMX bike racing) to gatherings like association, corporate and religious meetings.
The area has lots of attractions to offer, says Preece, whose resume includes a stint with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau. “There's nothing worse than coming into a new market, heading up a visitors bureau and not having product to sell,” he says. “But we are overrepresented in terms of recreation, art and culture, and family fun experiences.”
Things to do include outdoor attractions like rivers and parks; a symphony, a dance company and theater; and family activities like water parks and shopping.
“We have a value story for the folks who could come out here for the whole weekend and go to a Broadway play, for the price of what the tickets alone would cost in Chicago,” he says. “The underlying theme of value is important.”
Finding out who to convey that theme to was essential. In a general marketing focus group, Preece says the RACVB found that people simply didn't know what Rockford had to offer.
“It was encouraging, because if it was an awareness issue, gee, you can solve that. We actually had people writing down the Rockford URL (www.gorockford.com) during the focus group because they wanted more information.”
In the past, Rockford focused its marketing on families and affluent couples. Cohorts' segmentation allowed the city to get more specific.
“Cohorts has brought more clarity about who our visitors are and their characteristics,” Preece notes. “Many of our marketing partners [such as museums and water parks] collect basic data about their visitors. So based on anecdotal observations we had a fairly good view of who those folks were, but we didn't have anything objective or data-based.”
“Rockford had spent a lot of time developing product, and now they needed to develop the customer base,” says Mike Fitzpatrick, Cohorts' vice president of account services.
The RACVB did a data dump of both its own 100,000-name database (comprised mainly of information inquirers) and the files of several partners, and filtered that through the Cohorts data. One group of partners it hopes to get more cooperation from in the future is local hotels, which historically have kept their data close to the vest.
“Now that we've proven some successful use of this data with the non-hotel partners, it gives us a way to show them how it worked, and why they should join us in the next round,” Preece says, adding that the RACVB shared Cohorts' customer profiles with participating partners at no charge.
What did it find from the research? The best targets are affluent empty nesters, professional couples and couples with kids; families with midrange incomes and young children; and single moms with careers.
The latter was a surprise. “A single working mom with kids was not a target that was obvious to us. This has allowed us to look at niches and tailor messages to be more appealing to that group.”
Rockford does two seasonal direct mail campaigns — for winter and summer — and this year began experimenting with differentiated imaging and messaging to focus on the two biggest opportunities, empty nesters and wealthy couples with children. Each seasonal campaign is a series of five postcards with updated calendar listings for the period.
The postcards drive prospects the GoRockford.com, where visitors are greeted with a pop-up window inviting them to go to a seasonal mini-site. Other traffic-building promotions include a narrowly focused print campaign in magazines such as TravelHost, Chicago Parent, Oaklee's Guide, Illinois Meetings & Events, SportsTravel, and Midwest Meetings. Radio also is used, both for general area promotion and to plug events like the On the Waterfront music festival held earlier this month.
Online, a standing e-mail blast is sent once a month to the house file, and one-off efforts are done occasionally in conjunction with offers by marketing partners.
At the moment, tracking ROI for these efforts isn't easy because it's difficult to determine whether someone who inquired about area information actually made a visit, Preece admits.
“We don't have the data loop tied down,” he says, adding that hotel data would help the process.
“The closest way is when we run a specific promotion offer with a particular hotel and they put a promo code on it. But we know there's some leakage there too, because people will forget to give the code and book anyway, and vice versa.”
The Rockford Files
- Metro area population: 350,000
- Tourists: Come mostly from a three-hour radius of Rockford, from the Chicago area; Milwaukee and Madison, WI; and the “Quad Cities” (Davenport and Bettendorf, IA, and Moline/East Moline and Rock Island, IL)
- Annual RACVB marketing/operations budget: Approximately $3 million
- Annual RACVB direct mail volume: 200,000 pieces, in 10 drops
— BNV
In the Area
Next month, thousands of direct marketers will be only an hour away from Rockford, attending DMA 07 in Chicago. We asked David Preece for a few suggestions, should attendees have time for a drive northwest to visit the area.
Great golf course: Aldeen Golf Club
Great outdoors: Rock Cut State Park
Great apple picking: Edward's Orchards East
Great big dinosaur: Jane the Juvenile T-Rex at the Burpee Museum of Natural History
Great food: Brio Restaurant, Kuma's Asian Bistro, or Carlyle Brewing Company
For more area information, visit GoRockford.com.
— BNV
