Building a Guest-Centric Marketing Strategy

A guest-centric approach is essential for any destination looking to build a long-term relationship with visitors.

A guest-centric approach is essential for any destination looking to build a long-term relationship with visitors. Line Nøhr, from VisitDenmark, emphasises why putting the guest at the heart of all strategic decisions is crucial for long-term value creation. This necessitates a shift in mindset from focusing on tourist volumes to understanding what motivates them and shapes their behaviour.

‍

Transforming Mindsets

‍

Like most destinations, Danish tourism has many organisations involved in its promotion. While VisitDenmark is responsible for international marketing, at a national level Dansk Kyst og Naturturisme focuses on developing coastal and nature-based tourism, MeetDenmark prioritises the hosting of events and Dansk Storbyturisme draws attention to the major cities. Adding to this complexity, 19 opinionated local DMOs provide an extra layer of diverse opinions. This fragmented structure leads to political conflicts and occasional internal squabbling. Secondly, with tourism associated with negative connotations, there was an apparent need to use more friendly and welcoming language.

‍

In addition, while VisitDenmark engaged in numerous small-scale campaigns with local DMOs, they did not generate a substantial digital footprint. These efforts were focused on ongoing operations and not focused on achieving strategic objectives due to marketing teams not fully understanding the approach outlined within strategy documents. This highlighted a critical need for a complete overhaul, moving away from individual efforts to a joined-up, collaborative strategy, where national and local destination marketing teams and commercial partners are clear about how their roles contribute to an overarching strategic direction. These challenges required Danish tourism to undergo a fundamental change in the way the country is communicated and positioned.

‍

‍

Enabling a new approach required a change in mindset, from an internal focus of promoting Denmark to creating a more engaging and meaningful experience for visitors. Swapping the focus on attracting ‘tourists’ with welcoming ‘guests’, aligned with a desire for visitors to feel part of a community. As such, their behaviour was expected to become more respectful. This focus on guests also enabled VisitDenmark to shift away from only focusing on target groups and instead helped identify the need for better understanding of their travel motivations and behaviour. This involves digging deeper into what inspires and drives guests, rather than just focusing on where they can be reached.

‍

Prioritising the User Experience

‍

A key step in VisitDenmark's digital marketing transformation journey was the creation of an in-house User Experience (UX) department. This team acts as the voice of the guest, ensuring their needs are met. Comprising of experts in design, insight, UX management and customer relationship management, this in-house team facilitates a guest-centric approach by considering how visitors interact at every touchpoint across all 7 steps of the guest journey (dreaming, researching, planning, booking, visiting, experiencing and remembering). Importantly, a focus is placed on identifying and enhancing the linkages between engagement across different communication channels.

‍

Hiring a UX manager to lead the newly formed team complements the ongoing process for a transparent and inclusive approach to building a unified strategic direction. While this addition to VisitDenmark's team detracts from the media budget and reach in the short-term, it was deemed a worthy investment to ensure they promotion and branding is done in the right way.

‍

To support this new approach, VisitDenmark is launching a new web platform. Rather than changing the backend, which provides the infrastructure for all local DMOs and supports 180 webpages, a front end migration became the priority. Making the website agile and optimising the infrastructure for the future is the central objective of this process. Recognising that DMOs don't fully own the visitor journey, with guests visiting a range of websites, it was important to establish a lasting platform that strengthens quality guest engagements and is linked to their evolving search and planning behaviour. Ensuring sustainability, such as being very considerate around potential applications of AI and their related climate impact, is also necessary in establishing a long-term outlook and the continued relevancy of the platform. Complementing these optimisation, the integration of the VisitData customised data platform will bring all commercial data about Danish tourism into the internal database.

‍

Creating Impact

‍

Inspired by Google’s "messy middle" concept, VisitDenmark's new guest-centric approach recognises the importance of a non-linear visitor journey. It acknowledges that visitors move back and forth through the different stages of the guest journey. While VisitDenmark’s role is to inspire and help guests throughout every stage of the visitor journey, the challenge lies in determining when and where to intervene in creating value for guests, especially with the goal of attracting an additional 11 million overnight stays within the next five years. This is where ongoing research is key to informing approaches, with the DTTT working with VisitDenmark at the end of 2022 to produce a roadmap of the digital visitor journey between 2025 and 2030.

‍

‍

With collaboration a crucial tenet of VisitDenmark's new strategy, the DMO also embarked on a brand refinement process to drive consistency in how the country is positioned, involving representatives from local DMOs in the discussions. Despite hesitancy that too many perspectives would prevent progress, this collaborative approach built trust and buy-in from all stakeholders. While previously requiring all DMOs to include the tagline "Denmark, the Land of Everyday Wonder", the new guest-centric approach recognises the diversity between the destinations and how they all need to be marketed in different ways to appeal to their strengths. However, agreement on the creative look is key to portraying this differentiation and linking it to the overall image of Denmark. Alongside this, qualitative tests with guests ensure that the brand connects with the intended audience.

‍

The collaborative approach also extends to measuring the impact of the new brand, with local DMOs participating in the development of the KPI framework alongside VisitDenmark's marketing team. These KPIs are built around the 4 pillars of attracting, engaging, converting and retaining guests and are designed to provide a manageable overview of indicators to track progress without being too comprehensive for regular monitoring and analysis. This alignment is designed to enable clarity around the desired outcomes of marketing activities and acts as a mechanism for ongoing collaboration. This will ultimately improve the visibility of Denmark across all channels and create impactful communication opportunities.

Key Takeaways

Use language carefully: Avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes about tourism and instead promote a welcoming atmosphere. This will foster a positive perception and experience for visitors, who in turn will act more respectfully.
Clearly define roles: Aligning operational activities with the strategic decisions clarifies who is responsible for communications across every channel and touchpoint in the guest journey and helps unify all messaging. This helps avoid internal conflicts and ensures that everyone is working towards achieving common goals.
Focus on the drivers of visitor behaviour: Rather than just focusing on defining target groups and where they can be reached, it's more valuable to delve into their motivations and understand why they take specific actions. Putting the guest at the centre of decisions ensures that all outputs remain relevant and are designed to be impactful from the outset.
Prioritise user experience: Instead of being blinded by an industry focus, giving a voice to guests avoids missing out on potential opportunities or misinterpretations of messages. Advocating for guests enables outward thinking and ensures their unique perspectives are considered in strategic decisions, increasing conversion rates.
Adopt a future-oriented mindset: When making investments, particularly in digital infrastructure, having a long-term view builds longevity and avoids the need for frequent repositioning. This allows for establishing a baseline for marketing that can continue to be built upon.
Encourage sector-wide collaboration: Bring all stakeholders together for open discussions and create a strong sense of ownership across the industry. This inclusive approach to exchanging diverse thoughts and the creation of a framework for extensive data sharing enables trust and clarity that builds collective success.
Have a coherent voice: Unified messaging enhances brand recognition and impact. When all stakeholders use consistent messaging, it creates a stronger, more recognisable brand and is significantly more impactful than a series of individual campaigns that may dilute the ability for clear messaging.
Empower flexibility and creativity: Whilst a clear and concise national brand is needed, it should also leave room for regional and city destinations to draw attention to their unique assets. Rather than being overly prescriptive about the presentation of a country brand, enabling some autonomy for the wider industry will result in context-specific messages that enable product differentiation while also linking together to tell a cohesive story.
Measure what matters: Developing a transparent and manageable KPI framework allows for tracking performance. This focused approach underpins the effectiveness of marketing strategies, allowing for continued refinement in generating value for guests and generating ongoing insights into the channels they use.
Embrace non-linear processes: There is a need to move away from linear thinking and understand that the guest journey is more complex. Despite making it more challenging to decide when and where to intervene and who should communicate with visitors, having a complete understanding of the ebbs and flows in this process is essential for creating timely activations and determining how to attract, engage, convert and retain guests.