Case Study: Rockford, IL, Convention and Visitors Bureau
“Cohorts allowed our partners and our team at the bureau to better understand our customers and best prospective visitors, using a single lens through which to view them.”
- David Preece, president and CEO, RACVB
Fewer than 90 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, Rockford, Illinois features a wide array of destination attractions including golf, gardens, water parks, charming historic districts, and visual and performing arts. When the Rockford Area Convention & Visitors Bureau decided to evolve from a product-focused marketer to a customer-focused marketer, they turned to Cohorts segmentation services.
The Situation
The Rockford Area Convention & Visitors Bureau (RACVB) had effectively positioned itself in the association, affinity and corporate group markets, and was widely known as a premier venue for amateur sports tournaments. The leisure travel segment was viewed as a growth market, but the bureau had limited success in building a year-round vacation business.
In an effort to market the right Rockford product to the right visitor households, Cohorts was engaged to identify and understand the types and characteristics of consumer households who inquired about Rockford and those who visited the destination. Key to the success of the new marketing strategy was the support – and customer data – of local tourism industry partners.
The Objectives
- Understand what non-local inquirers about Rockford look like in terms of household composition and profile
- Uncover the consumer groups most meaningful among actual visitors, as well as the difference between them and inquirers
- Map the relevant Cohort groups’ population densities in key feeder markets to give insight to advertising and direct marketing plans
- Match regional destination product with the interests of specific consumer groups for targeted, customer-focused marketing communications programs
The Solution
Cohorts’ analysis of consumer data from those who had requested information about the region, as well as customer profiles from local tourism marketing, painted a clear picture of who had expressed interest in Rockford and who actually visited the destination. The lists of inquirers and customers/patrons were then compared against the Cohort segment concentrations of the marketplace population within 200 miles of Rockford. This allowed RACVB to understand which segments are most over- and under-represented in their database as compared to the marketplace they serve.
At the same time, local marketing partners – including botanic gardens, several museums, the symphony, a water park, a concert association and the park district – submitted their names to be similarly-processed by Cohorts. Once the matching had been completed, the Cohort-encoded database was provided back to the bureau, and each partner received its own report and the segment codes on its customer list.
Additionally, Cohorts also provided the RACVB with Cohorts Atlas™, a mapping tool that provides geographic concentrations of the Cohorts segments, which can inform decision-making for regional advertising and direct mail programs.
The Results
The RACVB and its partners have used Cohorts to build prospect lists and direct marketing programs that matched targeted prospective visitors with Rockford region destination product.
Prospect names were pulled from the Cohort-encoded list of inquirers and visitors, and were supplemented with a direct mail list of similar prospects rented from Cohorts. In addition, the RACVB has used Cohorts to guide media buying decisions to ensure the right message reaches the right prospects.
This highly targeted approach has quickly resulted in noticeable improvements in both inquiries and visitor counts. For example, a leading hotel who partnered in a winter promotion saw record-breaking package sales as a direct result of its first Cohorts-based targeted campaign, while the RACVB’s own website traffic increased by thirty percent over the same period last year.