Tag: travel and tourism

Thanks to everyone for participating in the 30 ideas in 30 minutes session at the Kansas Tourism Conference! A lot of great ideas were shared, and a couple even won a prize! We’ve compiled them all, plus a few from the idea box.

1. Plan event promotions like Hobby Lobby and use website, blog and social media to plan ahead for things like Christmas. (Julie / Visit Abilene)
2. Use AlphaMac to help with your marketing materials and data; it’s $2,500 per year, helps in an easy-to-read manner, and worth every penny. (Jim / City of Parsons)
3. Beat the heat with Christmas in July—music, shopping and bubbles instead of snow. (Holly / Visit Lindsborg)
4. Create postcards with local artists and then share with businesses to help promote your community. (Holly / Visit Lindsborg)
5. Create a fun opportunity for kids with a candy vending machine for only one penny. (Holly / Visit Lindsborg)
6. Get temporary tattoos for your trade shows–all you need is a spray bottle and some paper towels and then you have walking billboards of kids with your logo all over them. (Holly / Visit Lindsborg)
7. Highway 36 had the best pie contest for each county. Don’t be afraid to do the best burger, best soup or beyond. It’s great publicity and promotion for your restaurants. (Kylee / Seneca)
8. If you have two attractions that could connect, print vinyl banners and exchange to cross-promote each other. For example, our museum placed a banner at the waterpark this summer and vice versa; the CVB paid for the banners and it’s a dual promotion. (Melissa / Hays)
9. Recruit and raise awareness of the younger population with field trips to different locations inside your area. You can also use the website sign-up genius as a helpful tool to keep everything organized. (Lucille / Mitchel Co. Tourism)
10. Our gift shop now sells farm fresh eggs. We also serve food at our meetings and gift people plants for an easy fun freebie. (Susie / Cloud County)
11. If you’re tired of negativity on social media, share rewarding, positive quotes and giveaway goodie bags from the CVB to those people who respond positively. It doubles as a promotion and an extra reward for followers. (Visit Ark City)
12. Host influencers and take advantage of the cool equipment they have like this wonderful 360 camera. (Andrea / Explore Lawrence)
13. For national travel and tourism week we nominated our favorite frontline employees by using a QR code to nominate them. Two winners were awarded, and we’re thrilled too, because now they promote even better information about our community. (Dodge City)
14. We purchased 10 portable picnic tables with a trailer and rent out for events. It’s easy seating and creates pride. We even have community members pick them up with their own truck; it’s practical and provides community engagement. (Hesston)
15. We created a scavenger hunt which attracts kids and engages parents to go on a hunt ending at the art center. We give away a postcard or candy to those that finish and it brings in many visitors we would’ve never had otherwise. (Lucas Grassroots Art Center)
16. We use a project management system called Base Camp; it’s free to sort and create projects and gives notifications and keeps everything all in one place with the app. (Teresa / Wichita Art Museum)
17. We hid 100 glass blown orbs and hid them in every town in our county over the summer. For visitors to play along, we had them upload images so we could track people hunting; it was popular and different. April / Jackson Co. Tourism Council)
18. We created a statue trail which highlights all of our attractions in the walking tour in an attempt to help count steps by miles which promoted health and wellness too. (Michelle)
19. If you’re interested in hosting travel writers but can’t afford them, Colby is looking for contacts all the time and she is free and will include information in the newsletter so feel free to reach out to her with Kansas Tourism.
20. We did a Kansas day bingo card; we created a bingo sheet and encourage them to go visit a business attraction and put stamps with a box on the outside of such locations. It’s a free option and we gave away prizes to encourage lunch, shopping and exploration of our community. (Kylee / Seneca)
21. With Kansas now being a sports betting state, don’t forget to use your sports bars and create mini events–all they need is a cell phone and app to create fun sports betting in your Kansas destination. (Alan / Visit Kansas City KS)
22. We created a 10 parks 10 weeks promotion highlighting a different park each week in Merriam. We created fun park badges and hosted a contest where park visitors could tag us and our promotion, then be entered for a parks prize upon completion; it helped with engagement and gave us some great photography to use in future guides and publications. (Karen / Explore Merriam)
23. We at our field station didn’t get people to listen to the credentials to earn stamps so we had them name a member and get the kids engaged. Then, as the kids were named out loud, they were welcomed to the team publicly while they were collecting stamps. (Garion / Field Station Dinosaurs)
24. At Cedar Bluff Reservoir fireworks are not allowed, so we canceled the display and made it a firework-free zone instead celebrating with a parade. This helped to reduce anxiety in veterans and pets (vets and pets), and invited people to come and enjoy this area with no fireworks.
25. Adding to the sports betting don’t forget to promote and use free Wi-Fi. (Jim / City of Parsons)
26. As a cross promo with data, don’t forget to use Geo-fencing so you can get a full number of people where they’ve been and where they went by using cell phone data and marketing.
27. We promote our longest sculpted brick mural by measurements (for example: it is so many Patrick Mahomes to get to the other area). (Susie / Cloud County)
28. To help build murals, there’s a base grant for seed money and we used a T-shirt project to help fund it which provides money and promotions. (Lucille / Mitchell Co. Tourism)
29. To prepare for our NHRA nationals, there was an openly gay driver who had no sponsors. So, to promote our pride event we promoted him as a driver and positively share the sponsorship for the LBTQ community. (Sean / Visit Topeka)
30. We used leftover gift cards for online trivia with pictures and the first person to answer correctly won a gift card. (Ark City)