How Explore Utah Valley achieved a 98% CTR with seasonal tours (and you can, too)

Seasonal travel can be tricky; as a destination marketing organization (DMO), you know your usual travel seasons based on hotel bookings and partner reporting, but how do you leverage seasonal imagery to help show visitors and meeting planners when they should visit your destination? SKYNAV and Explore Utah Valley’s solution was to take to the sky to show visitors just how gorgeous and adaptable the destination can be year-round.

As a destination rooted in four seasons, but with availability for business and leisure travelers year-round, Explore Utah Valley was looking for a way to share its seasonal tour offerings with meeting planners. With stunning views and a market full of things to do and see throughout the year, the organization also hoped to share its destination with travelers looking for the perfect place to escape and explore.

Explore Utah Valley found that it needed a better way to showcase answers to the most commonly asked questions about its destination. The team at the DMO wanted to lean on SKYNAV tours to address the following points:

• Where would they recommend to take a meeting planner?
• Where do they want to drive leisure traffic?
• Where should seasonal travelers visit? 

“We wanted SKYNAV to capture all of our destination in a way that would answer these questions,” said Shaw. “We conducted a roundtable discussion, brainstormed, and asked our community partners and stakeholders what they would want featured and took all of this into consideration as well as worked closely with a few hotel and venue partners to get a more in-depth tour of their facility.” 

With SKYNAV as the solution, the team at Explore Utah Valley was able to create the best sky-view tours and easily place them into their Simpleview CMS website with clickable CTAs to view different seasons. 
 

Together, the teams created tours that are embeddable with a QR code and placed on decals across the entire county — like the Provo Airport, where a window display is set for visitors. The decal and QR code opens up a microsite that includes an embedded small copy tour from the SKYNAV platform. This tour highlights and focuses on things to do for visitors coming through the airport. 
 

The DMO has spent countless hours working to share the vision and beauty of its destination while trying to paint a picture in clients’ heads. This is where Simpleview + SKYNAV were able to help make the magic happen. “SKYNAV captures the vision of the beauty of our destination and makes it easy for us to share this with our planners and leisure travelers,” said Shaw. 

“A seasonal approach to your marketing is an opportunity to bring visitors and business to your community partners and members throughout the calendar year,” said Shaw. “Especially for those destinations that have members and partners who already offer year-round recreational opportunities, we should always be looking for ways to extend our partners’ marketing efforts and bring increased value to their partnership.”

With SKYNAV, Explore Utah Valley was able to achieve a 98% click-through rate on its seasonal views. As the DMO continues to develop seasonal views of its destination, it hopes to garner an increase in overall website engagement and time on site.

Any season can be a travel or meeting season with SKYNAV. Whether you are showing off snow-capped mountains perfect for skiing or featuring a beach view where meeting planners can host an outdoor activity — take to the sky and create views that will attract visitors and meetings year-round. 

Don’t stop there … consider creating seasonal content to pair such as user-generated content, blog articles, partner listing image updates, web pages or microsites dedicated to the season, or even seasonal travel mini-guides for the best things to do each time of the year.