May is National Tourism Month so 1Berkshire turns its focus to this thriving and growing part of our Berkshire economy. This month we celebrate the years of investments that have reshaped and preserved our downtowns and main streets and made the Berkshires a remarkable destination for people from all over the world. It’s also a time to learn about the work that drives our tourism industry. Come and get a behind the scenes look at what 1Berkshire does for the industry cluster.
Year-round, the 1Berkshire team works tirelessly to bring visitors to the Berkshires. In spring, we release 130,000 copies of the Official Guide to the Berkshires, a print resource that helps our members and visitors find each other. Augmenting our Guide we have a robust advertising schedule and an year round public relations campaign.
“Our marketing efforts at 1Berkshire focus on a year-round message. We are always looking at a unique ways to tell the Berkshire story to our key markets of NY & Boston while also expanding our reach.” – Lindsey Schmid, Director of Marketing 1Berkshire “In the past few year’s we have worked hard to speak to a younger audience in the hopes of bringing more visitors to our area in the shoulder season and mid week. Based on our visitation to berkshires.org, I can say that there is now heighten interest from a younger demographic.”
1Berkshire in its strategic marketing plan has moved away from magazine and print media and has turned its focus to digital media. Here we can reach a broader and yet more targeted audience on platforms like Pandora and Yahoo. We also use digital media networks that target travelers in our key markets. The results are astounding. Last year, 1Berkshire ran 64 different placements and garnered over 178.6 million impressions. This year, we’ll be running 84 placements.
We have also recently redesigned our enewsletter and re-envisioned our eblasts to be more collaborative. Now members can participate in more ways than they ever could from advertorial opportunities to tile ads. With our members support our cooperative advertisements reached a total of 1.9 million people last year.
Berkshires.org, our premier one-stop online resource for visitors to the Berkshires has tripled in traffic in the course of a year. In 2016 Berkshires.org had a total of 639,000 individual users. We also track who’s visiting our site by region, age, page views and more so in the future, we can use this information to better target our visitors.
Tourism brings new dollars into Massachusetts every year and these are dollars spent in local businesses like yours. It provides the means for thousands of jobs and is responsible for millions in tax revenue for both the Commonwealth and for Berkshire County’s 32 municipalities. The work we do behind the scenes is critical to our economy, reinforcing the need for funding and grants. As we ramp up for another big summer in the Berkshires, the 1Berkshire team would like to thank the thousands of people that support our visitors and work with us to market our beautiful county year round as a premier, world-class travel destination.