CAMPAIGNS AND PROGRAMMING MUSCLE SHOALS BACKSTAGE PASS The Muscle Shoals Backstage Pass, a visitor-value program, is aimed at driving more business to our music studios and music attractions. Patrons of the program receive a free, large-size VIP concert type badge and lanyard from any 3 locations in The Shoals. Visiting any 3 of the venues, patrons will receive a free Muscle Shoals Backstage Pass t-shirt from the Florence-Lauderdale CVB, and if they visited all 6, will have the opportunity to enter and win the grand prize drawn at the end of the year. From the beginning of the program, launched on July 15, 2020, we have driven over 1000 patrons to the 6 venues which has resulted in over $10,700 of incremental business to these partners. Over two-thirds of that number resulted in 2021.
Nashville’s Big Backyard (NBBY), 13 communities in the Tennessee natural watershed region, including The Shoals is a “back to the land” movement which offers big city dwellers a slower lifestyle with modern city amenities. After one year of building the NBBY brand, 968 Associated Press outlets were reached including CSPAN, Fox News, CBS News Radio, CNBC.com. Articles were produced in Forbes, Travel + Leisure, Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Fodor’s Travel, AAA, National Geographic, CBS News and many more. Since June 2020, the Nashville Big backyard awareness campaign has reached an audience of over 121 million.
The Florence-Lauderdale Convention + Visitors Bureau contracted with Epsilon, the global leader in outcome-based marketing for a digital ad campaign in 2021. Destinations can use the power of machine learning to drive financial outcomes for their communities. Economic impact begins with inviting high value visitors through highly targeted digital media, seeing those people arrive, and then measuring the actual money they spend in destination. We can see where visitors spend, how much tax revenue the marketing campaigns directly create, and understand the characteristics of high-yielding visitors. We can also help message local markets to keep the destination product visitor ready by encouraging restaurant retail, attraction visitation. The six-month campaign produced great results for our destination and resulted in a $21:1 return on ad spend. The overall performance of the 2021 campaign was a tremendous success! We generated over 5.5 million impressions with 2,533 messaged visits and a click-through-rate of 0.15%. In 2022, we will launch another campaign over a longer period.
