Data Is King
If You Aren't Investing In Research, You're Missing Out
What are you even doing if you aren’t tracking every marketing dollar with a KPI (key performance indicator), data point, ROI measure or benchmark? It’s like throwing money into the wind! You’re doing yourself, your stakeholders and your business a disservice if you aren’t investing in research and tracking data to back up your sales and marketing efforts.
This is especially true in international travel trade marketing, where it’s often difficult to track ROI. Your tourism board might be asking questions: What international markets are best for our community, businesses and attractions? Did that meeting or event you attended result in new itineraries, product development and sales? What is the ROI on our international tourism investment?
How you answer these questions and justify continued investment in marketing internationally to travel trade, attending tourism trade shows and spending crucial marketing budget to attract new visitors from afar is critical. In general, we can track everything from website clicks to newsletter opens to sales leads and number of meetings, for example. But tracking tourism product growth, measuring business-to-business marketing success and identifying return on investment from key international inbound tourism markets can often be elusive.
One option to consider as we look to solve this challenge is the RMI TRIP Report™. For over three decades, RMI has conducted extensive international travel trade research with the vision of tracking tourism growth through proprietary insights into key international tourism markets, including state-, city- and property-specific product inventory; trade estimated room nights booked; estimated visitor spend; and return on investment calculations.
The RMI TRIP Report™
The RMI TRIP Report™ creates compelling intelligence in a digestible format, showcasing the impact of international tourism marketing efforts in your state, city and even property. The report is a cumulative summary of hundreds of data points across top international inbound tourism markets stored in a dynamic database, allowing for real-time access and analysis of current city and property product inventory and estimated visitor spend calculations.
This reporting provides meaningful information to organizations in the tourism industry to help establish target markets, learn which market is most important for your business or destination and identify travel trade that is selling your products. Some examples include:
- What programs and accommodations are offered to consumers, and what product type (fly/drive, group, etc.)
- Identify areas for improvement (e.g. itinerary rerouting, ad-ons or new hotels)
- Targeted and productive meetings with particular operators at IRU, IPW, sales missions, etc.
- Benchmark travel trade growth year-over-year, and track estimated visitor overnights and spend
The RMI TRIP Report™ includes three main deliverables: Product Inventory Audit, Estimated Room Nights Booked and Estimated Visitor Spend.
With research in hand, groundwork is laid for continuing data accumulation, enabling you to establish where most international visitation and spending originate. From there, you can be smarter with your marketing investment, define and establish international travel trade return on investment, engage important stakeholders on the importance of international visitation and continue to welcome international visitors to your community.
Questions? Please shoot me an email at mjung@rmimarketing.com and we can discuss how RMI can work for you!
– Mathias Jung, CEO & Owner
