CVBs Can Boost Your Attendance

Over the past few years, the poor economy and fear of being seen as wasting money on “frivolous” travel combined to force companies to send fewer people to fewer trade shows, meetings, and conventions. In battling falling attendance numbers, planners found new allies in the forward-thinking convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs) and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) that stepped up to help. 

While the cities and counties whose hotels, convention centers, and tax bases rely on the income these shows generate were working in their own self-interest as much as the planners they assisted, the new marketing tools and services these CVBs and DMOs created will outlast the fading downturn, to the long-term benefit of association and convention planners.

Research and anecdotal evidence show the attendee drought that began in 2008 is fading. According to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research’s CEIR Index, professional attendance at exhibitions began to rise in the second quarter of 2010, jumping 4.5 percent over the same period in 2009, 6.6 percent in the third quarter, and 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter. CVBs and DMOs have learned that they need to do more than just hand out the same old visitors guides, sponsor planner familiarization trips, and trumpet reduced lodging rates and facility rental fees.  

“Instead of doing bulk marketing, convention and visitors bureaus really are lending themselves as a marketing arm to associations and organizations to say, ‘We’re here to help you with that,’ ” says Amy Ledoux, senior vice president of meetings and expositions for ASAE (the American Society of Association Executives). “They are even augmenting their convention services staffs so they can help facilitate those requests.”

This means building custom websites, providing email blast templates, and hosting webinars for shows that can’t handle such projects on their own. It means building smartphone apps. It means reaching out to local industries and organizations that might send delegates. It even means organizing custom events to drum up excitement for shows. 

But most of all, it means seeing a planner not as a client but as a partner, says Tina Jones, meeting and conventions marketing executive for Visit Orlando, the central Florida city’s CVB. 

“A couple of years ago, when the economy was changing, a lot of our clients lost staff or had to take on additional responsibilities,” she says. “They looked to us as a destination marketing organization to help them, to be an extension of their team, to help them find resources and take advantage of the resources we offer, and to help them get through their marketing campaigns, build their attendance, and get people excited to be coming to Orlando.”

The numbers suggest the new approach works. Recent Orlando conferences with attendee growth include the American Society of Hematology in December, which increased by 2,000 to a total of 21,000—more than 10 percent—and the generation industry show Power-Gen International, which grew 9 percent, to 19,272 attendees, in the same month. And overall business travel to the destination is projected to grow 2.3 percent in 2011, to 3.34 million, and 4.8 percent in 2012, to 3.62 million. 

Jones believes her position was unique when it was created a year ago. At the time, she worked for Visit Orlando’s convention sales team. She now leads a three-person team working mainly with planners. “When I was on the sales side I had a specific geographic market and specific size of group that I worked,” she says. “In this role I might be helping a group of 100 people coming to Orlando or a group that might have 40,000 or more.

“My main focus is helping groups to fill their attendance when they bring their show to Orlando,” Jones says. “That can happen in any fashion, from something as simple as helping planners with content or collateral to full-fledged marketing campaigns where we’re working hand-in-hand a year prior to the show. I tell them, ‘I am a part of your team; I’m here to help you any way I can. I’m the expert in Orlando, so if there’s anything you need, come to me and we’ll find a way to get it done.’ ”

That mindset is growing rapidly among CVBs, says Ledoux. “Cities are all vying for business,” she says. “They’re realizing, if their competitive set is doing it, they have to do it.”

Another DMO that has pulled out all the stops to help planners grow their attendance is the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau (ACVB), which helped the International Poultry Expo (IPE)and International Feed Expo, in town January 24-26, to realize its largest attendance growth in a decade. 

A staple at the Georgia World Congress Center, the IPE saw attendance grow 10 percent in 2011, to 20,742. Exhibitors also increased 11 percent, to 903. 

“2008 and 2009 were not banner years for us,” says Charles Olentine, executive vice president of the Tucker, GA-based U.S. Poultry and Egg Association, which runs the 63-year-old show. “We held our own, but we pretty much reflected the trade show industry” as a whole. 

While he says the improving economy had a positive effect on this year’s show—2010 was good for the poultry and feed industry—one of the ways his organization turned it around was by working closely with Mark Sussman, the ACVB director of trade show sales, to come up with ways to get people excited on the floor, Olentine says. Beginning in 2009, “Mark and I got talking about ways to get people more involved—both the community and our attendees,” he recalls. “One of the things ACVB’s really been pushing awareness on is the fact that Atlanta’s got great restaurants, and working with Mark and his staff we came up with the idea of Feather Fest.”

It began at the January 2010 show, as an online contest to drum up excitement by having area chefs submit appetizer and entree recipes using poultry, which were then voted on by both attendees and Atlanta residents. “It got fairly respectable participation,” Olentine says, adding that he had expected perhaps 10 or 15 restaurants to participate and got about 60. “We said let’s take it a step further, and this year, we added what we called ‘Food Fight’ on the floor of the show. The first day of the show, five of the Feather Fest restaurants brought their chefs down for a cook-off, and we had a celebrity panel that selected the best entree. The staff of ACVB basically put that together for us. The next day we had a hot wings contest, which Mark emceed. That had very good participation from our attendees.”

While it’s hard to quantify how special events like this boost attendance, it did target an area the IPE show was having difficulty with, Olentine says. “We weren’t generating excitement with the show. From the days when there were a lot of hospitality suites and people came in and partied, it had evolved to top managers coming in and spending a day or two at the most and leaving. There was a void of excitement,” he says. But after working with the ACVB, “we had the most positive response to our show this year than in any of our last seven years that I have been involved. I think that is a function of starting to make this more than just going down the aisles and seeing booths.”

Another area that the ACVB helped with was attendees’ reception at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Olentine notes that his group has been targeting international attendees as a strong growth area—successfully this year, as the 4,371 non-U.S. attendees represented a 13 percent increase, even better than the overall attendance growth.

“[The ACVB] talked to Homeland Security, the TSA, customs,” he says. “They educated people at the airport on our show.” So when the attendees arrived, the airport’s staff and officials “made a point of saying, ‘I see you are going to the poultry show. Welcome to Atlanta,’ ” Olentine adds. It made a difference, particularly with international attendees, he says, noting that more than a few told him that the airport experience was faster and more hospitable than in the past. 

“They turned a negative into a positive,” he says. “We feel like we have partnered with the ACVB. I think they have helped us improve attendance. Our surveys show the perception of Atlanta has improved over the last several years, from both attendees and exhibitors. I can’t speak highly enough of them.”

Of course, Iron Chef-style cook-offs and hospitable TSA agents, while impressive, are not the ACVB’s standard attendance-building tools. Along with the common marketing materials, the bureau builds custom microsites for associations and exhibitions, Sussman says. It brings groups’ presidents or executive directors to a professional studio in Atlanta to produce streaming videos that are marketed via email blasts. It even offers telemarketing to many citywide groups, mining groups’ past attendee lists or even doing database research for prospective attendees and calling the first 1,000 for free, he adds. 

“We launched our Southern Hospitality Discount Card in 2008,” he says. The DMO’s member attractions, restaurants, and hotels can opt in to offer convention attendees exclusive discounts, which are marketed to potential attendees in email blasts, he explains. 

“We have pushed to be more involved in [conventions’] marketing,” says Sussman. “We are always looking for new attendance-building ideas.”

Updating and improving the traditional CVB and DMO marketing tools is more important than ever, argues ASAE’s Ledoux. 

“What a lot of [planners] need when they’re promoting a city that maybe they don’t know about—especially an association’s annual meeting that might be in a different destination every year—is information about the city,” Ledoux says. “The person planning that meeting is really managing the functional and operational aspects, so cities are starting to help planners with promotional tools—images of the city, a calendar of events, promotional copy about the highlights of the city, statistics, and frequently asked questions.”

And while none of that is really new, Ledoux says, “in the last few years, bureaus have had to pay more attention to making sure that meeting professionals don’t have to seek out and find the area where all that information is gathered.”

Last month, Visit Denver, the CVB of Colorado’s Mile-High City, unveiled a completely redesigned website for meeting planners, available at www.visitdenver.com/conventions. 

“It was a ground-up rebuild of some existing information we had on the site, with a couple of interesting tools added,” says Justin Bresler, Visit Denver’s vice president of marketing. While most of the material was available on the old website, “it was not organized as well as it could be,” he adds. “In some cases it was a little outdated, and in some cases it did not reflect the format that planners say they want now—where we used to have a lot of print- and CD-based materials, it’s now all digital downloads. We have a very slick digital marketing kit where planners can download 20 or 30 different resources to get people excited about the destination—and when you talk about attendance-building, that’s what really comes into play.

“We like to think of Denver as a place people want to visit, but they may be unfamiliar with it, and their information may be out of date,” he says. “We want to remind them that in addition to what they already associate with Denver—Western heritage and great access to the mountains—we also have great dining and great cultural resources. We have electronic banners and postcards and email templates that include Denver imagery that we have selected, but that allow the meeting planner to customize them for their own needs: their show dates, their custom messaging, and their response vehicles. There are promotional materials they can order directly from us, everything from visitors guides to lapel pins.”

Similarly, the Palm Beach County CVB completely overhauled its website a year ago, relaunching it with more than 1,200 pages of content, including a new focus on ecotourism and on arts and cultural activities, says Steve Crist, its vice president of destination sales. 

“We’re trying to reach out to the attendees ahead of time to create more buzz about Palm Beach County,” he says. And given its reputation as a top Florida beach resort, there’s a renewed emphasis on pre- and post-conference stays and activities. “We’ve really been using that website to create a buzz about everything that’s going on in the county, from the attractions, to the events, to the waterways, to the golf, to the museums,” he adds.

Some CVBs are going beyond just providing raw marketing materials for planners to use. More and more are building marketing materials for them. One that is becoming more common is the custom microsite, like the one the Atlanta CVB built for the International Poultry Expo. 

“A lot of bureaus are creating microsites for organizations coming to their city, as attendance-builders,” Ledoux says. “There’s always been a website for the bureau, but creating a microsite for the organization built by the bureau is a newer phenomenon, within the last two years.”

 

Only the larger conventions and associations can build a custom website for each event, she says, so having a CVB build one “is huge” for planners from smaller organizations that don’t have the resources. They generally are based on a template that already has destination marketing information like hotel descriptions, dining and nightlife lists, and other activity suggestions, with room to add in an events calendar, session descriptions, a registration page, and other specific information, Ledoux adds.

California’s Anaheim/Orange County Visitor and Convention Bureau has been providing free microsites for more than four years, says Mindy Abel, its senior vice president of convention sales.

“We design attendance-building microsites working with the planners,” she says. “It’s a one-page summary where people can really direct attendees to the resources the destination offers. It puts information in front of the group that might be needed, as well as things that might be of interest to them in planning their trip.”

This can range from directions from the airport and weather reports to tools for booking restaurant reservations. The CVB can also include a ticket sales 

window, offering discounted group tickets to attractions like Disneyland. These microsites often highlight the bureau’s two-year-old Show Your Badge and Save program, which offers discounts at more than 100 restaurants, attractions, and retailers. “It’s becoming a real draw for us,” Abel says. “Certain groups, like educational and technical groups, are very heavy users.” 

While many planners are still experimenting with how to incorporate social media like Twitter and Facebook into their conventions and association meetings, even those who know what they want to do can have trouble getting it done these days, says ASAE’s Ledoux. 

“A lot of smaller organizations don’t have the staff for all of those social media tools,” Ledoux says. “So to that organization, that’s huge—to have the bureau help guide them, and having  access to that whole social media world. I think that’s pretty new, within the last year or two.”

One organization that is leading the pack in this regard is the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau says Ledoux, who sits on the Texas CVB’s customer advisory board. 

Last year the bureau worked with social media strategy consulting firm Sparkloft to manage all the social media needs—including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube—of the Biomedical Engineering Society’s 2010 annual meeting in November. The result was a 218 percent increase in Facebook fans and a 461 percent increase in Twitter followers.

“A lot of bureaus are looking at apps for iPhones to guide people around, so they are having to get immersed in that world of social media,” Ledoux adds.

Visit Denver has a new app that, unlike its microsite, is not customizable for individual conferences. But the CVB can extract data from it in a format that planners who are building a conference app can easily incorporate, says Bresler. 

“We have an annual ski retailer show here in January called the SIA Snow Show, and if you look their app, you will see our dining information there,” he adds. “We want planners to be the conference experts, and we want to be the destination experts. We don’t want them to have to pick restaurant recommendations, for example, based on less knowledge of the destination. We provide what we see as the authoritative list of data.”

Visit Denver also offers conference attendees a text-message-based discount program, called Denver Deals. “You are not signing up for alerts, you are sending requests for information with a keyword combination,” Bresler notes. By texting keywords including “Denver deals” to 63638 you’ll see discounts from hundreds of area businesses. Adding other keywords, such as “Denver deals Italian” returns more targeted results. 

The Palm Beach County CVB can use its iPhone app, launched last year, to send specific text messages to conference attendees—for example session room changes—without the planner getting involved, says Crist.