One of our members asked for some idea of brochures sent / web enquiries, actually going through Visit Guernsey and after a chat with Chris Elliott this morning, he's come up with the goods.Below is a copy of the information received today and hopefully this will continue on a monthly basis for all of you who love your stats:-
As discussed, some figures about marketing activity to date this year.
I know you've sat through my presentation about how we planned to change things a couple of times already, so I won't bore you with too much detail, on the strategy behind this. But just to summarise, the major change of focus has been:-
- Targeting media most likely to be read by our core target market.
- Focussing our marketing spend more closely on areas within 90 minutes travel of an airport which serves the Island
- Much more direct mail, choosing the target groups carefully on geographical, and lifestyle criteria
- Much more use of specialist publications ( walking, heritage, foodie etc etc)
-Starting the campaign much earlier. In recent years we haven't run much before April time in the belief that the focus these days is much more on short breaks, and the decision time for these clients is very close to the travel time. However, not having any presence in the media at the time when people traditionally start thinking about holidays ( which is during the depressing period just after Christmas and into January and February) has, I think been to take things rather too far. Our campaign this year started in January.
It's early days in the season and so performance assessment really needs to be based on the amount of activity that is provoked by our marketing. The stats to date are very encouraging.
Website Hits.
The main call to action of much of our marketing is to visit the visitguernsey website, which then leads to the hotels pages and the airlines, ferries etc.
Stats. are as follows
January 93,681 hits (28,000 up from January 2006
February 87,469 hits (25,000 up on February 2006)
March. 101,956 hits (21,000 up on March 2006) This makes it our busiest month ever on the site.
This represents an increase of around 36% on the same three months last year, which is pleasing
Brochure Requests.
Brochure requests coming in are up 16% on the same period (January to mid-April) last year.
Obviously web hits and brochure requests don't translate into the same number of actual bookings, but so far it's very encouraging. It's far too early to start getting too excited but the signs are good.
I hope this helps. In terms of individual properties, we won't have a meaningful picture of occupancy trends until later in the year, and as always it will vary from property to property.