RESOURCES: Newseum Website

A Day Without News Campaign

Resource: Linganore Winecellars Website

My guest today is Brittany Diehl, once part of the Downtown Frederick Partnership team in Maryland, now the Marketing and Communication Specialist at Downtown Denver Partnership. In addition to nearly 20,000 residents and 123,000 workers, the Colorado capital downtown area welcomes over 2 million visitors each year. Britt’s job is to communicate with those folks about everything from events to legislative bills and community initiatives.

In our discussion, Britt tells shares a few tips for using Facebook Events and Instagram stories more effectively, reveals 5 key elements involved in making a summer-long pop up park such a success, and ties it all together with the core philosophy of the Partnership.

Resources: More on the "Square on 21st

VIDEO: Silent Discos

Tiffany Ahalt operates "Star-Spangled Tours," a receptive tour operator in the Washington, DC area. She's been a tourism and destination marketing professional for over 20 years and is passionate about sharing history and local flavors with guests.

Tiffany talks about underutilized marketing techniques for DMOs, creative ways to mash-up itineraries for public/private tour packages that "wow," and why a good prop may be all it takes to trigger selfies and social media buzz.

Resources: Star Spangled Tours Website

Whitney Hahn has been honing her marketing skills since she was a teenager working at her family's zoo. In this concentrated episode, Whitney shares some observations and best practices for using video to promote your leisure or entertainment business, including an overview of different types of videos and where they perform best in the sales funnel, ways to think about video for SEO vs. video for social media, and questions to ask before planning a video marketing campaign.

Resources: Downloadable Guide to Types of Videos

A veteran of the travel industry for over 10 years, Becky Bickerton is the Director of Sales and Marketing for the Tourism Council of Frederick County (MD). We discuss ways to create clever campaigns, her favorite data tracking points in Google, Facebook and others, and how to create content that engages visitors AND your local audience.

Resources: Visit Frederick website

VIDEO: Discover Ireland

Austin Meyermann is a recruitment marketing specialist. We talk about how to stop the revolving door of seasonal employees for attractions with a year-round approach to recruitment, incorporating social media the right way, and powering referrals and retention with creative incentives. 

Our buddies at www.TalentCMO.com were happy to share info to some of the tools (many are free) they recommend as part of your recruitment marketing kit. 

 "For email recruitment marketing, we use MailChimp. It's free for up to 2,000 contacts. 

 To manage recruiting oriented posts across social media profiles, we use Hootsuite. It's free up to 3 social media platforms. 

 Hotjar is a great tool to use to see what candidates are clicking on once they are on your website. This is very helpful since you don't want to have a page on your website where no one clicks. No clicks, no leads, no clients. 

To create simple graphics for social media posts, or even some for your website, analytics reports, etc., we use Canva. It's a free tool that has many graphic design templates. 

Lastly, we love using JazzHR. It's our partner of choice when it comes to the applicant tracking system (ATS). They make it very easy to navigate a hiring process from posting a job, to setting screening questions, communicating with candidates, moving through the hiring process, etc."