Minnesota Tourism: How Are We Doing?

[Music] all right um so i'm going to introduce our day chair for today um uh mark lapivitz will be our day chair mark is a duluth native and resides in minneapolis with his wife jennifer they have two children jackson in washington dc and tessa at skidmore college in new york he likes to fly ski and see live music as he just mentioned uh and go to the theater with his family and friends he works with great colleagues and partners as ceo of the lion hotel group of duluth based hotel management company please welcome mark levitz well i'm really pleased to introduce lauren bennett mcginty the executive director of explore minnesota because we share a common purpose which is advocating for hospitality in minnesota it's uh so critical to the state and uh if you're involved in it as your primary business it's you know it's been a interesting few years and continuing lauren bennett mcginty was appointed state tourism director by governor walls in november 2021. i guess the pandemic is over then right since starting her work with explore minnesota bennett mcginty has directed statewide tourism plans policies and programs to promote minnesota as a top travel destination she has more than 12 years of executive hotel experience in communications operations finance hospitality education and advocacy at minnesota based nonprofits most recently she served as the director of the minnesota craft brewers guild where she led strategic events strategic plans excuse me executed major events and guided overall marketing for more than 160 breweries lauren loves everything about minnesota's unique four seasons including the great outdoors tuning in to local music festivals and events and tasting our way through the state's vibrant food and craft beverage scene so please welcome lauren thank you well good morning everyone thank you for having me um i always say somebody's connected to somebody in craft beer and that was right this morning so um but so happy to hear all of you going on vacation i love that moving moving around the states seeing new things there's a lot out there um and you know happy to support that and and let you all know that most businesses are a part of tourism it's a huge part of our economy as you'll find out here and um i think it's just so important that we talk about how critical it is to keeping things moving keeping small towns buzzing um and getting new people here to experience the beauty and just kind of awe-inspiring things that minnesota has to offer so we'll get off my soapbox for a second here and give a presentation [Music] there we go okay so explore minnesota is the state's tourism office we promote travel to and within the state we do some promotion inside of the state and i'll get into the details a little bit more later on how that balances out percentage-wise um but primarily our goal is for all intents and purposes to bring visitors from outside the state to spend their money here that's kind of the baseline we have other goals as well um our vision that our vision and mission which we are actually changing very soon and we'll um publicly announce within the next couple weeks um but for now um is to elevate us as a premier destination uh back in march when we had our tourism conference i declared that i would like minnesota to be a top 10 state for travel um and right now we have a lot of top 10 articles we have a lot of places that kind of make all these different listicles but we are not necessarily top 10 for places that people think about when they want to travel and i want to change that so um we kind of are these things on paper but we're also i can get this to work there we go several other things so i always like to talk about us as storytellers we take what is going on around the state and we get to launch it out to the world and my favorite thing is learning more about various parts of minnesota that i've never heard of or festivals and events that are taking place that are really unique and special like the spam uh 85th anniversary or um how grand rapids is celebrating julie garland's judy garland's um 100th birthday so we have a lot of really unique special things here and i love to talk about it and we make connections all around the state whether you're a dmo you're a hotel you're in food and beverage we get to connect people and we get to tell those stories as we do it we are innovators we have to find ways to work with a small budget to talk about minnesota worldwide so we are always thinking of new ways to do that we are always getting creative with how our ads function and just for context you know among our neighbors we actually have the smallest budget so to be able to kind of stand out in that crowd is really special and we're open-minded you know we're always looking for new opportunities so that's why i love talking to groups like this because you know you are also the same way you like to find new opportunities and find new ways to talk about the work that you're doing um so these this is a quick overview of how we support the travel and tourism industry in the state of minnesota you know we work with destination marketing organizations that also include some convention and visitor bureaus depending on how they work in their city um tribal nations we're actually right now scheduling a tour of tribal nations so that we can talk to them more about how they might like to talk about tourism and how we might be able to help them um and then you know tourism related businesses whether that's festivals or events major festivals events or you know other hospitality i also work with the commissioner at deed and we do some roundtables with various business owners throughout the year as well co-ops partnerships welcome centers um if you're ever driving over the borders be sure to stop at one of our welcome centers our staff are super knowledgeable and very friendly um and then of course evented story marketing and then we have our tourism council so if at any point anybody in hospitality and tourism would like to join we have some new openings every year and we have a 28-person council that advises and provides feedback and kind of just shares what's going on in the industry there we go um this is a laundry list that i'm not going to read out loud but you can see that we have a lot of connections to various parts of the hospitality and tourism industry but we also have a lot of national associations that we work with so i'm fortunate to be part of the national state tourism director group um with brand or with travel usa travel and um we also have several other marketing associations that we're part of that allow us to be able to reach more people with less dollars so places like cruise the great lakes and if you didn't know uh for the first time and i think 13 years we're getting cruises back in duluth which is really exciting and then starting next year they're actually going to be uh an embark embarkment point um so they built a brand new facility there to houses really exciting stuff um and we also work with you know the mississippi river parkway commission um and the various international lgbtq plus travel associations and um other groups that allow us to kind of learn more about what's going on in the country in the world but then also kind of spread our marketing dollars further so some of these stats are a little old we don't necessarily have a good snapshot from our last quarterly survey but i think that this is a good thing to talk about so obviously you know in march things were still in progress and i think they still are in progress i think if you are in the hotel or food and beverage business you might not be seeing a full recovery until after the end of this year and into next year and that all of course depends on how things go with inflation and how things go with kovid it's still there um and so looking at these numbers we're seeing that businesses reported that they were doing better but not fully back to recovery at that time it is lovely outside right it's so nice it's patio season it's driving to the north shore season you know we know that people are getting out there um and we also know that minnesota is a hot spot for people coming and discovering what we have to offer because the pandemic was able to kind of open up everybody's eyes to the fact that we have tons of outdoor recreation and a lot of options for people to kind of get out of their homes and try something new so there was a really positive outlook for summer and we still see that going that 91 of minnesota residents and 76 plan to take leisure and or overnight trips that number is also being reflected in a longwoods international survey that is saying 91 of americans still plan to travel of that number we just got this data yesterday 31 say that inflation gas prices will um impact their travel plans but not enough to fully cancel so they might just kind of make adjustments so it's something we're keeping an eye on um we have been doing a ton of work on trip on a tank full series so where can you get in minnesota on just one tank of gas um we also are kind of having conversations with the department of transportation about various electric vehicle charging routes that people can take so we're trying really hard to make sure that everybody understands that regional travel to minnesota is easy convenient and doesn't cost as much as flying somewhere else um we're of course also hitting the fly market but in the summer a lot of people like to stay regional so that they can do a quicker trip um so those numbers i anticipate at the end of the summer will be higher but again i think with some hotels especially in the twin cities area in southern minnesota we're not going to see those numbers bounce back up for a little while yet and of course i've been tracking these issues since about march and we've got labor shortages are still an issue gas prices are still an issue confidence inflation and now of course we're looking to potential recession um so you know just keeping an eye on those and figuring out how we can market the affordability of minnesota but also kind of all of the majesty we have to offer whether it's in the twin cities or in greater minnesota so we recently started strategic planning we kicked it off in march and we gathered stakeholder feedback from around the industry and put it all together to kind of create our draft plan and we are not yet in phase three which is going to be um after we launch the plan we're still in phase two but we're working on an integrated strategic marketing plan so explore minnesota has several different departments but um most of them are working on marketing and previously we just haven't had a plan that says how does industry relations communicate with marketing or the welcome centers and communications and so we're bringing it all together and it's very big and very robust and a lot of work and in a short amount of time but staff has been fantastic and we are really excited about our new strategic plan because it really moves our state forward i think previous to the pandemic you know a lot of the work we were doing was find your true north and kind of that classic minnesota feel we're not too boastful we're just we're just here to say that it's great um and i want to be boastful i want to be louder and you'll see in some of our ads that they're very different than things we've done previously we're really at a point where uh places like wisconsin or illinois or you know north dakota are doing similar things to what we were doing and we wanted to move away from that and differentiate ourselves and really be kind of that north star um that people can kind of flock to you and see something a little bit different so with that i wanted to share a little bit from our marketing campaign so if you were familiar with finder true north we're no longer doing that um but we really wanted to make all of the places seem 10 times more magical than they already are because they are definitely um but we we added some special effects to some of the photos that we have and some of the videos to just amp up the colors and kind of what you experience when you're looking at them but overall we really wanted to do a lot of these like big wide shots to show that whether you're in a city or you're on the north shore or even in southern minnesota you have these like big experiences that you can have and they're very magical um so very fun and different for us as we're getting ready for if you can believe it we just wrapped our winter video shoot and it is so odd to watch snowboarders while it's you know 90 degrees outside but here we are uh and and we're doing a few things a little bit differently we're going to be doing a lot more quick cuts um and visceral experience sounds and all of all of that good stuff so we're kind of taking this and amplifying it even more um but i do video hopefully okay did the moon really fill the entire night sky was the food made by an alchemist and the streets filled with music could we reach up and touch the stars in this world that felt so intimately ours [Music] were these experiences out of this world or did they just feel otherworldly [Music] and is there any difference explore minnesota so that's our 30-second ad um that is playing sometimes here uh i know that the governor said he saw it on kare11 which is just wonderful he was very excited he said i was watching the ad and i was like wow i really want to go there and then it's at explore minnesota so that's great i love that um that's a really good plug for us and um the ad as you can see is very different but it's magical it shows kind of from southern minnesota all the way up to um where you can see the northern lights we have beautiful experiences to offer so i think it's a really fun way to kind of reset where we're at in minnesota did the moon really fill the end there we go okay so kind of talking about money um 70 of our marketing dollars are spent outside minnesota to get people here so if you're seeing ads here in minnesota that's okay but we do i always get questions about how come i'm not seeing it all the time and if you are seeing it all the time then we're not doing our job right um so 70 are spent outside bringing that new money in certainly we encourage people to move around the state as well um i think you know the hardest part is we as a community in the twin cities especially tend to just go north right so if you're thinking about going somewhere in state i suggest southwest or southeast as you saw there was uh some caves that's in southeast minnesota and then we also have a national wildlife refuge in the pipestone area that you can visit too so there's a lot of really great opportunities outside of the north shore but i get it anyway so eight million dollars is going to be spent on marketing over the next year and that actually includes our eda funding so that was this is the largest we've been able to spend on marketing um in the past several years um we actually have not had a budget increase in 15 years so i'm working on that um hoping that our new strategic plan and kind of all the new things we're doing we'll see a budget boost in the coming session and then as you can see these sort of blue markets here are current markets and um on the right side there is how we kind of spend and where that falls and you'll see that digital is huge so that keeps growing and growing traditional marketing on tv or on radio just is not as big and it's not as impactful anymore and so that digital really encompasses anything from banner ads or digital magazine pieces to social media spend you can see that we have paid social in there as well so we've got a good mix of things and people are seeing things everywhere the nice thing is that digital spend allows us to bring people directly to our website and if you haven't been to explorerminnesota.com i suggest checking it out it's a beautiful website um and we've done just a lot of really great things and we actually are one of the top tourism websites for accessibility which is a great thing to be um as all of that changes but um kind of in in the markets i just want to point out that we just did some really great experiential projects where we got to go to um pride in st louis missouri and um were also in chicago around the 4th of july and we put up a really big tent with pictures of minnesota on the outside and people got to walk through it and see videos of minnesota and we had thousands of people kind of come through and sign up to learn more and enter to win a dream vacation here so we're doing kind of a variety of different marketing tactics including some in-person stuff in in other states which is really fun so here are some of our niche marketing efforts and our niche marketing allows us to be country-wide um so as you saw before we had those smaller markets kind of right around in the region but these allow us to really diversify around the country in various magazines or um online publications um we can kind of hit these various groups of people and get them to come here and so these are serious people who are so you see like biking sure we want people to be biking around casually but we also want to kind of hit biking markets that are specific to mountain biking investing in that product and wanting to go somewhere and try some new trails that they haven't been to before so that's where we get to kind of invest a little differently and try new things and really diversify our marketing portfolio here are some of the strategic partnerships that we have in minnesota that allow us to um kind of broaden beyond our borders as well so um you know some of these pieces allow us to kind of hit people within minnesota but then we have things like the iowa wild our minnesota wild affiliate and they we have some in stadium signage and on tv when they are on um so that is some additional exposure minnesota aurora is our newest partner and esport minnesota is the jersey sponsor so if you ever get to one of those games you'll see our logo on their jersey um but these are just some of the partnerships that we have to again kind of diversify the way that we're marketing um you kind of have to be super creative these days about how you get the word out about where to travel because especially now that the pandemic has settled down a little bit people are wanting to go out and so you're really fighting for that share of voice among all of the other folks in the region so if you're interested and i can send these slides afterwards this is usually something that i do for dmos but i also like to do it for businesses in the hospitality industry if you're having an event or you want your business listed as a place of interest for people to visit you can add it to our website and we're actually making improvements to our business listing and event listing right now so that it's easier to sign up and it's easier to manage um and easier for people to search so when people come to our website they can figure out what their travel plans are and they can add your business to their travel plan so i always like to put a little plug in for us there but you don't have to memorize this right now um other things that we offer the industry if you weren't aware various opportunities like grant programs for marketing tourism related activities um of course we have all of our marketing and you can download the dream state toolkit if there's anything you want to market that kind of has that feel um we have the emt express which i always suggest everybody sign up for because you can see what's happening in and around the tourism industry in the state and then of course we have research and reports which i think is really great for businesses to just kind of see where the industry is trending what input we're getting we do do a quarterly survey with hospitality minnesota and the federal reserve of minneapolis to figure out business conditions for resorts hotels and other hospitality businesses and we're actually going to be compiling a monthly um report that our researcher just showed to us yesterday actually where it has been tracking trends in anything from hotel occupancy rates to our quarterly business um survey that we do and then a few other data points and it's kind of taking all of our data and putting it into one powerpoint monthly so you can see where we are in the road to recovery so that's a really exciting thing that we're going to launch soon so lots and lots of stuff on our website on our industry page if you're interested in kind of learning more about tourism and the impact of tourism and nope that's it okay so i will take any other questions too if anybody uh has any yet more not money you talked about the arts and culture stuff we are probably one of the three or four best places in the united states because of the world-class minnesota orchestra the guthrie theater the mia the if we just go on the resources here incredible walker i don't think that was me and i just i i i hope that somehow that's being uh taken advantage of because we are really remarkable in terms of of the cultural amenities in in minnesota particularly in the metro area yeah i think that's a great point um i think outside of chicago we're really one of the only locations kind of in the greater midwest that has those amenities so we definitely pushed that and actually i'm really excited about a winter ad that we're doing that features a contemporary ballet um which we've never done before it's something totally unique and if you saw it you would be like i can't believe that's minnesota so we're really kind of leaning into that i will say it's been real really interesting to hear um you know i'll talk to somebody from maybe lake of the woods or grand rapids they're like we should only talk about fishing um which hey i love fishing we absolutely should talk about fishing but we also have to balance that with the arts and culture and so um kind of with that and and as our strategic plan goes live in a few weeks here you're gonna see a lot more emphasis in welcoming all and and kind of working with more of our cultural communities our lgbtq plus communities um and really finding ways that we can engage um the various aspects of sort of non-traditional what you think of when you think of you know arts and culture and in elevating the stories and the experiences um beyond uh kind of the the stable things that we think of so we're really excited about that as well i'm just curious what the the limited budget you've got how do you measure which ones of your efforts are being most productive in bringing the most folks into minnesota that might not otherwise come here that's a great question so we work with a group called true media they do ad buying and then we also work with weber shandwick and um you know we do a lot of measuring we have a dashboard that is overwhelming but really it comes down to um testing a lot of things ahead of time to know that they will have a good impact and i think that that is where um you know we've been fortunate where we get to kind of field test something so when we had chosen this new dream state campaign um we did try the find your true north in a little updated fashion and we kind of compared and contrast with a focus group and the focus group chose the dream state and said that that was much more of um an experience they want to have than just kind of the find your true north piece so it's a lot of testing and then a lot of like hoping um and then really just kind of measuring where people are coming from um where our website visitors are coming from uh the website world is changing when cookies go away but cookies have been going away for years now so we'll see um but really just kind of figuring out where the most traffic is coming from and then um changing and shifting our spend to accommodate the people who are more interested so it's kind of a constant um updating engine that we're we're running here very very informative i really appreciate having this update um since i do a little work with the initiative foundations around the state i was just wondering you have so many partnerships already are they playing a role at all among your partnerships to help sort of focal or localize some of the efforts you're making to draw people in or to make people more aware of specific regional opportunities for for tourism yes so most of our partnerships are um usually kind of cooperative or in kind and so we're both putting money in to elevate whatever event or feature whatever that is so it is a shared marketing venture i will also say that we have been getting more into kind of opportunistic marketing and as you know minnesota's actually been um have been the star of some pretty marquee events we have you know the 3m open that's coming up we have the mls all-star game we had the women's final four so we're in talks with a lot of those groups to just kind of figure out where we can fit in the twin cities marathon is coming up and we're going to be working with them uh they bring 30 000 runners to the twin cities from around the world and then another 300 000 spectators which is incredible and they're celebrating their 40th anniversary so um we're working with them too so really a lot of it is kind of finding those opportunities and then partnering with people who want to partner with us i think and then we can kind of share the load there there we go what do you think is the biggest roadblock at the legislature for getting some additional dedicated funding just knowing how much like sales tax is generated through the tourism industry the department of revenue has reports on that annually and i think if you look at proportionally how much of the sales tax that goes in from tourism that actually gets filtered back to the tourism industry is not very much so is what do you think is the roadblock to kind of getting that level of education to the legislators about hey you need to reinvest in this in order to keep it cycling in well i think it's just that it's education and when i um in my previous role i was also lobbyist for the minnesota craft brewers guild and so just understanding that a lot of legislators are slammed with requests in in things that their constituents want and don't necessarily know the finite details so a lot of it is just getting in front of them and explaining to them all of the things you just said and more about the impact of tourism and i think you know we are strangely in the environmental committee um for where our bills sit so a lot of it is kind of educating you know that group of people which is a little different um some of it is working with places like the dnr who kind of help move our bills through especially at the end of session in negotiations um and talking to the governor's office and just sharing what it is that we do i think there's this sort of nebulous idea of what tourism is but what i like to say is it's actually a visitor economy so it's more than just people traveling and renting a cabin it's really business travel it's you know even if you come over from hudson for a night it's all of that and it's all impactful um and so it's it's educating people on you know that if we didn't have explore minnesota tourism and if we weren't marketing to people from outside the state every household would have to pay an additional 600 plus dollars um back to the state right so how do we tell that story a little bit better and so that is like one of my number one priorities for the next session is really just providing tons and tons of education and frequently to the legislature into the governor's office to show how impactful tourism is any other questions i do i'm a avid biker in the last september i biked the mississippi river trail starting from my task all the way down to iowa border and so you talked about biking mountain biking i'm kind of curious right the twin cities often talked about as this great bike livability community we have great bike trails and so kind of a from a national perspective what is the biking tourism industry i've never thought about leaving minnesota to go biking but i'd like 600 miles last september on a great river trail slash road what what is the national kind of uh economy around bike tourism yeah that's a great one you almost left the state to go biking if you went all the way down there you go and you could have gone all the way down to the gulf of mexico if you really wanted to um but it's interesting that um you know if you're a really really hardcore mountain biker and you want to kind of hit all the unique trails you know certainly there is that small audience but a lot of it is working with dmos around the state to figure out um like you said the twin cities is a great biking location we know that there are rentable options here and so we kind of want to promote that too everything we do i say it has to be accessible from the hardcore to uh just the casual engager of that activity so sometimes we get questions about you know why are we promoting snowmobiling like well how accessible is snowmobiling to somebody coming from florida you know that's a question that we have to ask all the time so for biking i don't know that the biking um the hardcore biking economy is is as big but i do know that we have tons of options for people to rent when they come and we like to promote that too great uh any other questions i do have one i'm a father of teenagers they don't go to websites or look at email but i probably am influenced on what they will tell me they want to do in the state how are you reaching them whether it's youtube or you know all they do is follow people so tick tock or other things so just curious um so we are of course on instagram and tick tock and i won't even say facebook because they probably have never heard of it um but we are looking into kind of expanding our tick tock presence because that is where as they say all the kids are hanging out um and it's becoming bigger and bigger i will also say what we're doing that um i think almost every state is probably doing now is working um with influencers so we recently just had um corey lee who does accessible traveling uh he does a blog about uh using a wheelchair to travel and he just did a couple days in minnesota and we also just worked with the wonderful wives which is a lgbtq couple and they came in for pride and they have a huge following so really it's kind of finding those people that are in some of those niche areas that have those big followings that can come and experience minnesota and share it out we also worked with an influencer in chicago who um she is interested in now coming up here because she walked through our exhibit in chicago and was so excited about it so um you know it's just finding people either in our state or from outside of our state to come here and document their experiences and and that's kind of how they set their own travel guide and influence your children to influence you um and i and i keep telling our staff to him like we need to focus on um younger people i think traditionally you think about the the person in the family that spends money so our our traditional um age bracket was like 21 plus to 65 is kind of our target market and i said well i don't know i think a lot a lot of kids now are influencing their parents to do things and i think we need to start kind of showing them what that what that experience can be so we are expanding that a little bit more and we are very uh very slowly dipping our toes into tic tac it's scary out there so we're just trying to figure it out we have a question online from matthew matthew unmute lauren good morning i i just wanted to say welcome back we we had you as a guest under the craft brewers guild um in spring of 2020 and um it's great to see you again we just wanted to say thanks for coming back and um thanks for a wonderful presentation thank you yeah and i can talk about beer too brock likes beer i think is there any other questions otherwise we'll turn it over well thank you so much so we have a relationship with a minneapolis organization that works with uh youth at rescue and um your speaker gift is to have the comfort in knowing that you've signed a book that a third grader from a community leader so if you would please sign that we'll go to uh yes closer to mike you guys know what i said uh but i was just thanking warren and uh if you would uh please sign this book we'll get it to a third grader uh in um his way to grow and thanks again it's uh great to hear we got an advocate yes wonderful presentation lauren thank you all right um so i wanted to thank uh everybody who uh volunteered today our greeter gail noakes um the reflection from joyce agnew thank you uh happy bucks steve morris our day chair mark webovitz um and then brock and greg for as our zoo masters uh and then also back to steve again and dick for our club at club admin so as as we mentioned many times we're going to say it again next week we will not be here we will be at the fillmore theater so please register go to the website follow the directions we'll meet in inside the fillmore theater lobby and then go upstairs so with that go out and have a wonderful rotary week thank you [Music] you

2022-07-27 09:21

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