Research will help ensure that the decisions you make to market your Destination Management Organization (DMO) are based on verifiable facts that influence how you position your destination, allocate marketing dollars, and attract the right visitors. There are two types of research that can help inform your marketing efforts: primary and secondary. Research that has been commissioned by and conducted for someone else is considered secondary research. While there can be a great deal of value for DMOs in evaluating secondary research, most of that value lies in understanding overall trends. Secondary research can also serve as a guide to help you formulate your own research goals and questions and figure out what is most applicable to know about your competing destinations, target visitor markets, travel behaviors, visitor spending patterns, and economic conditions. However, if you are looking to inform your marketing efforts with data specific to your target audiences and that will help achieve your specific goals, primary research will prove to be of great value to your efforts. 

Advantages of primary research 

Take these advantages into account as you consider the value of primary research: 

• Accuracy: a genuine, first-hand account 
• Depth: you set the parameters 
• Bias: you determine the vantage point of the results 
• Control: maximum control over data collection methods 
• Perspective: reveals new opportunities for destination development and visitor engagement
• Measurement: sets a baseline for future “progress measurement” 
• Foundation: informs methodology for future research efforts 

Why Independent? 

The goal of research is to objectively inform your destination marketing and management decisions. If the same firm is conducting research and developing destination positioning, messaging, and media strategy, an inherent (and unavoidable) lack of objectivity exists. Just like you don’t want a prosecutor also being your judge or a radiologist also doing your surgery, you don’t want a marketing firm conducting your research or a research firm developing your marketing. And when you do have this separation of church and state, you have two valuable marketing team members whose sum is more valuable than their parts—an independent marketer who can objectively evaluate the research to inform your destination positioning, messaging, media strategy, and campaign execution, and an independent researcher who can objectively evaluate and help shape the marketing to ensure it will hit the mark. 

Informing your Marketing Action Plan (MAP) 

As you develop and update your organization’s MAP, primary research can be invaluable to the process. In step one, as you identify the target audiences that will influence your success, primary research helps define and prioritize these groups. In step two, as you define each group’s role in your DMO's success, primary research helps give insight into each of these groups and what they need to do to contribute to your success. But primary research is most valuable in step three, as you formulate what these groups need to believe about you in order for you to succeed with them. How? The results of primary research can help you objectively: 

• Identify the primary reasons people visit your destination.
• Understand how prospective visitors compare your destination with competing destinations during trip planning.
• Determine how well the destination experience meets visitor expectations. 
• Quantify your customer demographics and psychographics for profile development.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen attractions, experiences, amenities, and visitor services.

Your target audiences' expectations (what they need to believe about your DMO in order for you to succeed with them) must be realistic but should also be aspirational. Once the beliefs are defined, primary research can also provide a high level of credibility to many of your stakeholder groups—including local governments, tourism businesses, attraction partners, hospitality providers, and community leaders—that often don't see the potential of your organization. Finally, primary research can be helpful as you develop processes to communicate these beliefs consistently across visitor marketing, stakeholder engagement, and destination development efforts. Over the last 15 years, Stamp has developed more than 200 Marketing Action Plans, including many for Destination Management Organizations, informed by independent primary research. If you are using Stamp's resources to help develop a MAP for your organization on your own, I hope that this explanation of why primary research is important and how it can inform your MAP development process has been helpful. If this article has left you with some unanswered questions, please click on this Calendly link to schedule a call.