Efficiency.
Every destination — big and small — is packed with unique assets, distinct personalities, and their own challenges and opportunities. Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) are the same. Budgets, team sizes, and resources all vary.
Efficiency is the core strength that allows small DMOs with big goals to punch above their weight class. And nothing fuels efficiency’s oversized impact like leveraging technology to level the playing field.
So we’re checking in with a few tips to help small DMOs and their teams streamline work, save time, and maximize their results.
Simplify Your Simpleview CMS
Organize Your Content
Sounds simple, right? Well, sometimes we overlook simple — and cost ourselves in the process. As Ben Franklin said, “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.”
Keeping your Simpleview CMS organized unlocks time-saving widgets, image searches, and page builds. Here are a few easy ways to score simple wins with tangible benefits:
-
Tagging: CMS tags are at the heart of both the internal and external experience. To put it simply, they save you time and make a user’s website experience better. Internally, you can use CMS tags, navigation tags, and asset categories to easily and automatically feed widgets. Meanwhile, users will get a better experience with fresh, related content. Check out these best practices to get you started.
-
Save panels and widgets: You likely have a few panels and widgets you use on multiple pages and blogs. It could be a certain call to action, a panel with a background color, or a text box that serves as a spacer. You can save these elements — and save yourself time — to make your most common building blocks easier to find and deploy.
-
Clone pages: Why start from scratch if you don’t have to? You can create templates of landing pages, blog posts, and more to easily clone them in the future and maintain consistency across your website. At Simpleview, we do the same thing with a few blog templates that we clone to keep our content consistent.
-
Clean up image titles: Ever spend what seems like an eternity trying to find a specific asset in your media library? That perfect picture is in there if only you could find it … well, it’s time to stop the time-sucking search. Develop a naming strategy for your assets that helps you find them more easily. Taking an extra minute now to give them clear names will save you time down the line.
Set Up Tasks
Tasks help you assign jobs, track workflow activity, and set up reminders inside your Simpleview CMS. It’s a simple feature that takes one more thing off your plate. Need to take down a seasonal promotion? Set up a task to remind you to do it at the end of the season. Want to see what tasks are outstanding for you or your team? You can set the focus on your own projects or zoom out to see a bigger picture. It’s another way to clear some space in a cluttered brain to focus on impactful initiatives.
Master Microsites
Microsites have been around for a long time, but the term can still be confusing to many. So here’s a quick definition: Microsites are a collection of pages that live under a parent page with navigation that differs from your website’s. Many smaller DMOs have a signature event or critical campaign. You can use microsites to promote these while keeping your website evergreen, as well as set up vanity URLs for your microsites for cleaner links in print advertising and collateral. Check out this blog about when and how you should use microsites if you want to learn more.
Explore Additional Tools
When resources are tight, every investment matters. So when you look at new tools, they better offer real value. If you’re looking for new technology that amplifies the work you’re already doing, we have a few recommendations.
Map Publisher — Custom maps can be an efficient way to squeeze more functionality from a single piece of content. Map Publisher lets you create customized, branded maps for events, markets, and more. You can also use it to create itineraries to share with leisure, group, sports, and meetings markets, push locals to explore their community, or highlight a series of unique stops and trails. Your creativity can harness maps in countless ways — and with countless visitors.
Dynamic Content — Every user wants a digital experience built around them. With dynamic content, you can do just that. Dynamic content allows you to add user personas into your Simpleview CMS, and automatically cater content that is relevant to their interests when they enter your website. A few examples that highlight how to use dynamic content:
-
Encourage family fun by crafting content that connects parents with children’s museums, family-friendly adventures, kids’ favorite restaurants, and more
-
Highlight sporting events from your calendar, create content to convince sports tourism travelers to extend their stays (and spread their dollars) after their event, display your destination’s sports assets, and a prompt to sign up for your sports newsletter
We recently covered how to use the dynamic content module in Simpleview CMS and a few more potential use cases. You can check it out here.
Save Time with Simpleview CRM
Empower Your Partners
Regularly entering and maintaining partner information, assets, and events can steal your team’s time. Take it back by giving your partners the tools to manage their own data. CRM Extranet lets you focus on action. It’s a secure portal where your local members and partners can keep their information up-to-date so you don’t have to. They can also use it to see how web visitors are interacting with their information on your website (without having to ask).
Clean Your Data
Yes, we’re talking about organizing again. But it’s spring cleaning season, so we’ll feature it twice. Like so much of life, the quality of what you get out of your Simpleview CRM depends on the quality of data going in.
It’s easy for data to go awry. Entry errors, bulk records, staff turnover, and shortcuts can slowly erode the quality of your data. But just like organizing your Simpleview CMS, time invested now can pay off with future time savings, process improvements, and efficient functionality. Here are a few key tips to clean your data — and keep it clean.
Automate With Traces and Triggers
Here’s another one that will be familiar, but proves how valuable strong systems can be. Traces and triggers ease your mental load by tracking communications, automating action alerts, driving member and partner onboarding, and more. Here’s how it works:
-
Traces assign and track activity within your Simpleview CRM. You can use traces to remind yourself and your team to conduct ongoing sales activities, update records, and more.
-
Triggers automatically generate traces within Simpleview CRM when certain conditions are met. For example, you can create a trigger that automatically assigns a trace to your team whenever a new member/partner account is created.
Together, they form a powerful backbone that streamlines your workflows. You can even use them to remind you to do that data cleaning we mentioned.
Schedule Your Reports
No matter how big or small a DMO is, reporting is essential to identifying and sharing success. When you schedule reports, you don’t have to worry about blocking time off on your calendar each month to pull them. Instead, they will automatically run on a specified date and be sent to the selected contact. You can customize the start date, frequency, users, format, and description to keep every stakeholder in the loop without spending extra time each month.
Figure Out Forms
Forms help your DMO collect information and send it to any user group in Simpleview CRM. You can use forms to capture information about local businesses and events, visitor interest, newsletter signups, and even request for proposals (RFPs) from planners if your destination has a meeting venue. You can deploy forms on your website using either the automatic integration between Simpleview CRM and Simpleview CMS or through an Application Programming Interface
Invest in Integrations
Scattered spreadsheets and isolated tools are a fragile foundation to build on. Manually moving data and information and relying on spreadsheet systems that shatter when an employee leaves is costly. Tools that work together are an investment that helps you:
-
Work smarter by maximizing the data already in your CRM instead of duplicating it in two (or more) separate places
-
Improve partner relations by letting them update their own listings, events, and offers and giving them reporting that shows the value you provide
-
Seek seamless support from a provider that intimately knows all of your crucial platforms
BONUS!
Take Us Up on Training
Powerful tech platforms can be a lot to take in and keep up with. So asking your Simpleview support team for training and refreshers can go a long way. Here’s what one of our analysts suggests:
“When there is too much time between trainings, I find that clients can get stuck in their routines, and their knowledge of the features, tools, and alternative workflows gets lost over time. Routine reminders of what Simpleview CRM can do often result in lightbulb moments where clients realize they can do some things much more efficiently.”
Jon Leff, CRM Analyst, Simpleview
Embrace Connections
Okay, this one isn’t related to technology. However, it can help small DMOs source solutions to their challenges from similar organizations. One of the hidden benefits of working with Simpleview is the access you get to a community of DMOs around the county. Here’s a sneaky tip from one of Simpleview’s many former DMO pros:
“I wish I had a better understanding of how big Simpleview truly is when it comes to the number of DMOs served and the services we provide. In my roles at Explore York, I often got to connect with other DMOs in our region, but we were at all differing staff sizes or budgets, which could make comparing best practices difficult. Since Simpleview serves so many DMOs, it's easier to find DMOs closer in size, budget, or types of attractions to better compare notes and learn what services have worked best for them. It can be scary, especially for a small DMO, to make the investment in something like SEO, so being able to connect with people who know what you’re going through and who can share their experience is truly helpful, even if they’re across the country from you.”
Sarah Palmer, SEO Analyst, Simpleview
