Hasta La Creative!

When the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau learned more people from St. Louis were visiting, it sent some of its most entertaining ambassadors to the Gateway City: line dancers. The Dallas-area city has combined quantitative and qualitative research with information from mobile tourism data provider Arrivalist over the past 18 months to learn more about who’s coming to town and to isolate potential niche growth markets. Cities including New Orleans, Atlantic City and Palm Springs have also invested in new data and analytics to reveal where tomorrow’s visitors are.

“If we know that there are a lot of people coming from a certain market we can even verify that with qualitative and anecdotal information,” said Mitch Whitten, VP-marketing for the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau, an independent nonprofit organization that contracts with the city. Data from Arrivalist, informs “not only where to spend paid dollars but also helps inform our public relations as well,” he said.

Dispatching line dancers from Fort Worth’s famed honky tonk, Billy Bob’s Texas, to the Taste of St. Louis last summer was a natural way to inject the city’s culture into a place that research indicated interested travelers would be. In the past, Fort Worth has marketed mainly to cities within a three-hour radius such as Oklahoma City and Houston, but now wants to identify “micro-targets” outside that vicinity, said Mr. Whitten. The Chicago Air Show was another destination for Fort Worth PR recently, he added.

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