It’s likely you have a destination marketing organization for your area, but you can’t rely of them completely. They have internal politics, a limit on resources, and in many cases, a lack of motivation to drive results for your business. We hate to be overly blunt, but the truth is that they get paid regardless if your business does well and they need to “share” their website traffic with you and every other vacation rental management company, hotel and resort in the area.
Website traffic + lots of “leaks” to other websites = not much left for you.
Don’t get us wrong: many Destination Marketing Organizations do a great job and spend millions to create awareness for your area. But, they have their drawbacks too.
Instead of relying on your DMO to drive traffic to your website (and often paying a fair amount of money to get that traffic), you can create your own mini-DMO. We call this the Neighborhood Marketing Organization.
A Neighborhood Marketing Organization is a marketing platform devoid of branding for your accommodations business and instead seeks to drive website traffic through the following key pillars.
Good NMOs Are:
- Specific: they have in depth content about a specific neighborhood or subarea in your area
- Helpful: they truly aim to take “help, don’t sell” to heart. A thinly veiled “advertorial” will be immediately obvious to any potential guest
- In depth: the resource has to be detailed and locally fact checked. 200 word posts about things to do are NOT going to drive results
- Up to date: updated as needed to provide accurate information
- Useful: a guide you’d send your Mom when she visits
- Patient: don’t expect results right away. Much more like an index fund and much less like a lottery ticket
What does a NMO look like?
We’re glad you asked!
NMOs are not hard to find.
In fact, our team has created a NMO for a popular beach destination in the South Carolina coast to tackle this very concept.
Here’s how that website has performed (keep in mind this destination is highly seasonal, hence the drop-offs during Fall/Winter):
We’ve created pages on: things to do, restaurants, fishing, kayaking and more in this destination. During the peak months (July), we’ll expect to get over 2,500+ visitors to the website. The email list has grown to over 1,500 people who are interested in visiting this destination. The traffic is hyper-targeted, the effort was low but consistent, and the results are excellent.
