Tourism marketing for Collier County is aiming for new spots over the next year, with new images and videos that will build on what has been a successful campaign.

“We are changing the look of the creative a bit. It will be large photography, with very limited copy. The overall theme will be “Discover Your Paradise,’ ” said Jack Wert, the county’s tourism director.

With tourism and tourism spending growing in the county, so too has the pot of money for tourism advertising.

Overall, the marketing budget for fiscal 2015-16 is about a half-a-million dollars bigger than it was last year, increasing to $5 million. Marketing is funded by a portion of a 4 percent charge on hotel and other vacation stays in the county.

Washington, D.C., is one of the new markets the county’s tourism bureau may target this winter. Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Columbus and Cleveland in Ohio will be added for sure. Atlanta, Georgia, may also get some extra attention, with so many direct flights now offered between the city and Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Wert said.

The new marketing will include TV spots, online ads, and outreach through social media.

“They have certainly been touched by social media, some digital. But we are just adding some additional weight to the messaging in those markets,” Wert said.

The messages will be a bit different based on the targeted groups, everything from foodies to meeting planners, but they’ll all push the upscale Paradise Coast brand.

This winter, the tourism bureau will once again show real-time temperatures in Naples on outdoor boards in Chicago, Minnesota and Toronto and on subway boards in New York, comparing them to the icy temperatures in those cities. There will be similar advertising on the Weather Channel. Those efforts will start a little earlier this year, in the first week of January, Wert said.

The goals of this year’s campaign are to:

Grow tourist tax revenue to $21 million

Increase inquiries to the tourism website by 10 percent

Grow requests for the official visitor guide by 5 percent

Increase year-round occupancy by 5 percent

Grow the return on investment to an average of $110 for every dollar spent on advertising.

The fiscal 2015-16 campaign began with marketing Naples’ Stonecrab Festival and all the activities around it in late October. From now until the end of the year, the marketing focus will be on golf, with several high-profile golfing events teed up over the next few months, including the LPGA CME Group Titleholders Tournament Nov. 19-22 and the annual Franklin Templeton Shootout in December. The campaign includes spots on the Golf Channel and other cable channels, and digital ads on golf-related websites.

“It certainly helps us begin to get our messaging out there to help drive the first quarter business,” Wert said. “Of course, first quarter business is also driven by cold weather up north. That certainly helps, but it’s important to get messaging out sooner because golf is something that visitors like to do while they are here vacationing.”

Collier County’s budget for international marketing will be about the same as last year, with plans to use more social media to reach potential visitors in South America, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe. The county will continue to partner with Palm Beach County to cover the cost of having marketing representatives in Brazil.

In the spring and summer, the bureau will continue to focus on markets in Florida that are within a few hours drive of Naples, Marco Island and the Everglades. The campaign will extend farther out of state, too.

Cedar Hames, the CEO and chief strategy officer for Paradise Advertising, Digital and Entertainment, the county’s advertising agency, said new photos and videos have been produced to target the meetings and leisure travel markets.

His agency hired an internationally known photographer to take pictures and had its videographers follow behind to get the footage for videos, a strategy that saved a lot of money, Hames said.

This year, Paradise will use 15-second commercials chocked full of information to advertise the destination and may run some of the spots back to back. It used to do 15-second and 30-second advertisements, but Hames said viewers would often drift off in the middle of the longer ones.

“It’s all about telling stories and tugging on the emotions,” he said.

The larger marketing budget will allow his agency to “heavy up” in some of the markets it has been advertising in, on top of reaching new markets, Hames said.

It’s important, he said, to keep everything fresh in the campaign, but there is no need to change the strategy.

“Obviously, tourism is up substantially,” Hames said. “So it’s working. So you don’t want to reinvent it.”

Source: http://www.naplesnews.com/business/local/colliers-upscale-lure-to-reach-new-markets-in-tourism-campaign-24ad6383-b566-59e4-e053-0100007f881c-351452111.html