by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
When the Jacksonville and the Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau changed its name last November to Visit Jacksonville, John Reyes, president and CEO, promised it was just the first step in a new era.
What he didn’t say was that the next step wouldn’t take long at all.
At the same time he was making that claim, the Visit Jacksonville staff was creating and implementing some innovative promotions centered around the Atlantic Coast Conference Football Championship and the Konica Minolta Gator Bowl.
The promotions were used by broadcasters in Boston, Washington, D.C., Lubbock, Texas and Columbia, S. C. to create on-air and Web-based contests that brought two fans from each team’s market to Jacksonville.
The contests were also a big success for the radio and television stations in each market that were part of the campaign. Each had an exclusive opportunity to promote the home team-related vacations to their listeners or viewers.
According to Visit Jacksonville’s calculations, the campaigns combined to generate a total of more than $77,000 in media exposure in the four markets, all for virtually no money spent.
Visit Jacksonville’s corporate partners donated airline tickets, hotel rooms and game tickets to the ACC Championship and Gator Bowl valued at close to $7,000 in exchange for radio and TV spots as well as Web links on each market’s media outlets.
“We were able to leverage what we have and it became a true win-win situation,” said Visit Jacksonville Director of Corporate Communications Lyndsay Rossman. “We couldn’t have done it without our partners.”
It wasn’t just the contest winners who were touched by Visit Jacksonville’s message while they were here. The organizations developed a “Welcome to Jacksonville” kit that was distributed to guests at every hotel.
“We wanted our visitors to know there are other things to do here besides football. An important part of the package was a calendar that included our annual events like the TPC,” said Rossman.
“The best part was we e-mailed the kit to the hotels as (an Adobe Acrobat) file. They made copies for their guests so it didn’t cost Visit Jacksonville anything to have them printed,” she added.
Building on the success of the two college football campaigns, Visit Jacksonville then entered into a partnership with the Boston Globe to put a link to www.visitjacksonville.com on the newspaper’s Web site home page in the week leading up to the NFL Playoff game between the Jaguars and the New England Patriots.
“The Tuesday before the game, we received 80,000 hits on our Web site from Boston.com,” said Rossman, who added that the link to Visit Jacksonville’s Web site has since been made a permanent fixture on Boston.com’s “Travel” section, which receives 425,000 page visits each day.
“We’re taking advantage of technology to achieve maximum exposure for our message — and what we’re doing doesn’t really cost us anything,” she said.
Visit Jacksonville has also created a variety of new materials spotlighting the area’s tourism opportunities. The first wave of press releases was distributed to the travel trade press nationwide and that effort has led to even more exposure for Visit Jacksonville’s message, said Rossman.
Area attractions and cultural offerings are well-covered in the Feb. 2008 “52 Great Weekend Getaways” issue of Florida Travel & Life magazine. Rossman said while the reporter was in Jacksonville writing the story, he discovered Matthew’s in San Marco, which led to the restaurant being featured in the issue’s “Taste” section.
Next up for Visit Jacksonville is a program to bring more multicultural groups to the city’s hotels and meeting rooms. The effort will focus not only on the groups themselves, but on a part of the year that is historically slow in terms of booked conventions and other large groups.
An advisory board, chaired by City Council member Mia Jones, has been established to help promote Northeast Florida’s diverse heritage and promote the area as a destination to culturally diverse groups. A large percentage of those groups prefer to meet during the months of July through December, when hotel occupancy is usually at its lowest.
The board will consider a range of possible strategies, including attending trade shows for meeting planners, discounts on hotel rooms, meeting space and services and developing marketing materials that would position Jacksonville as the top destination for culturally diverse groups.
Visit Jacksonville was recently awarded a $20,000 grant from the state tourism office, Visit Florida, that will be used to fund the first new piece of printed material designed to attract the target groups.
“Jacksonville is an especially attractive market for multicultural groups to meet due to our beautiful natural surroundings, great weather and economic value,” commented Theda “T.J.” Jackson, Visit Jacksonville’s Multicultural Accounts director.
Sports events bring in thousands of room nights to Jacksonville each year, but they are only one piece of the pie. This chart shows where the hotel bookings came from in fiscal year 2006-07.
Visit Jacksonville 2006-07 by the numbers:
• Visitors contributed $8.4 billion in total economic impact.
• Convention visitors booked 181,621 room nights.
• Duval County is the eighth-most visited county in Florida.
• The hospitality industry generated 117,800 jobs for local workers.
• Northeast Florida ranked highest of the seven regions in the state for business travelers at 27 percent.
Source: Visit Jacksonville