Situation

Visit Estes Park is the official Destination Marketing Organization for Estes Park, Colorado. Like many DMOs, the organization depends on dedicated lodging tax revenues and advertising dollars for day-to-day operations.

With over 400 tourism related businesses in the area, it would have posed a challenge for the Visit Estes Park team to start an online advertising program that educated each local business decision maker, as well as an easy to understand, low-maintenance reporting solution to prove the value of visitestespark.com advertising.

Visit Estes Park had three primary goals upon engaging the Destination Travel Network:

  • Increased Return On Investment (ROI) and online conversion rates for partners
  • Increased annual revenue with online advertising
  • Provide partners/advertisers/stakeholders with easy to read advertising reports

Solution

Visit Estes Park worked with Simpleview and the Destination Travel Network to design a site that offered several online advertising opportunities. Businesses appearing on the site can select categories from featured or enhanced listings to banner advertising. The partnership included:

  • A custom media kit designed by DTN
  • New advertising options for shareholders
  • New website design to help create more available areas for partner advertising
  • Custom reports, leads spreadsheets, Google Sites URL, and more from the Simpleview SEM team

Results

In June 2013, the website launched with a new advertising strategy, and the domain was moved from estesparkcvb.com to visitestespark.com.

In just six months, overall website advertising revenue increased by 104% with the addition of DTN's online ad sales. This resulted in a total projected revenue increase of 210% by the end of the first year - in online advertisements alone. Not only that, Visit Estes Park accomplished:

  • 10 featured listings, with specialized highlighting profiles for shareholders Increase annual revenue with online advertising
  • 11,171 unique ‘Book Now' events, with 5% conversion rate in the first month

To read more of our case studies, please see our case study page.