Choose Chicago: Tourism Marketing Case Study

THE SETUP

Regional traffic had run out of room

Choose Chicago had grown on two sources of visitors. Regional drive-market traffic and convention guests. Both worked for years, and both had topped out.

The city set a more ambitious vision for growth, which meant reaching people well beyond the Midwest. The existing program could not do that, because it was built around proximity.

Media was going into large network and broadcast buys. Those reach a lot of people near the destination and tell you very little about which of them converted, so there was no reliable way to prove impact or reallocate spend.

The shift required was not a bigger budget in more states. It was a different organizing principle. Geography had to stop being the strategy and become one variable inside it.

Household reach tripled year over year.

THE SOLUTION

Behavior over geography

We started with search behavior and cross-device usage to map the traveler’s path from first touch through booking. That told us where the money was actually working and where it was only reaching people.

Then we moved the organization off broadcast and network buys into digital channels we could measure, and built a framework driven by behavioral and contextual signals instead of distance from the city.

Program highlights include:

Segmentation prioritized by proclivity to spend, willingness to travel, and perception of the destination
Content aligned to the city’s messaging strategy and its authentic, inclusive vision of Chicago
Targeting matched to digital partners indexing high against those segments
A shift from regional to fully national and international market scope
Travel-centric data sets including Adara and Conversant
An expanded leisure program with endemic partnerships and international influencer hosting
A dedicated team for organic content and technical website support
A partner program creating new revenue for Choose Chicago and direct traffic to DMO members
A B2B messaging strategy and sales enablement tools for the convention program, including Connecting to Chicago

THE STRATEGY

Build the foundation and then scale on it

Once location was a targeting variable rather than a boundary, the same program could serve regional, national, and international objectives without being rebuilt for each one. That is what made scaling possible.

The convention side got its own treatment. Meeting planners buy differently than leisure travelers, so we built separate B2B messaging and sales enablement, including a program designed specifically to lift event attendance.

By 2019 the constraint had moved. We were driving most of Choose Chicago’s traffic to a website that could not hold it, so we took on a multi-year rebuild covering stakeholder interviews, requirement definition, an audit of nearly 4,000 pages, and a new visual identity built from scratch.

THE RESULTS

National audiences that spend more

Moving off proximity-based buying grew reach and improved the quality of the audience at the same time.

3X

Year over year household reach

20%

Increase in web traffic from national top-10 DMA states

7%

More spending from national visitors than regional

What changed:

The mayor’s three-year visitation goal was met in one year
Chicago drew a record 58 million visitors
National visitors outspent regional ones, so the market expansion improved revenue per visitor rather than just volume
Chicago was named Best Big City in the U.S. by Conde Nast Traveler readers every year of the partnership, five years running, the only city ever to do it

I truly value Envisionit's partnership as we've scaled our programs, evolving further towards digital forward as an organization. Bringing efficiency and insight into how we engage our audiences, we've seen continued growth since day one.

Rita Chen VP of Marketing, Choose Chicago