How to municipimp your municipality

• April 05, 2012

By Alexandra Reid

Introduced at Social Media Breakfast as the guy Klout calls an “authority on shoes,” Ottawa Tourism’s director of digital marketing,  Nick Iannitti, is attempting to do what my fellow Ottawans might consider the impossible: change the perception that our beloved city is “safe and boring.”

As you may have guessed, he is employing the powers of digital marketing to influence potential tourists to come to the city. Mainly, he is aligning social media with a creative content marketing strategy to promote Ottawa as a destination and to encourage people to book vacations through the Ottawa Tourism website.

According to Iannitti, a city like Ottawa should be regarded as a very large brand with something to offer everybody. In Ottawa specifically, there are three broad categories of potential tourists:

1. Those who know Ottawa and are interested in seeing what it has to offer.
2. Those who know of Ottawa but haven’t formed a strong opinion.
3. Those who don’t know anything about Ottawa.

Each category requires messaging tailored to its specific interests and existing knowledge of the city. For example, it is likely that those in category one already have a destination in mind and will probably be ready to book within three months of their travel date, says Iannitti. They can be targeted by advertising specific events with the call to action “book now.” However, those in categories two and three might require content that is more entertaining and engaging to change or influence their opinions.

While the digital space offers “more room to play,” Iannitti said it has also presented a number of new challenges. Before the pervasiveness of the internet, people used to read consumer reports to decide what they wanted to purchase. Today they are turning to an average of 18 websites before they make a decision. Where people used to make decisions at the point of sale, they are now deciding what they want to do during the research phase online. This “zero moment of truth,” a term coined by the minds at Google, requires marketers to be there every step of the way for every kind of potential buyer.

To leave a lasting impression in the highly personal digital tourism space and influence purchasing decisions, Iannitti  is focusing his team’s efforts on trying out different approaches to social media to determine their effectiveness, which he says can be done on a relatively modest budget. So far, he has found success in creating entertaining videos that offer something specific to each target demographic. He said focusing on Ottawa’s unique characteristics, on what makes it different from other major Canadian tourism destinations like Toronto and Montreal, has been fundamental.

Innovation, said Iannitti, has also been crucial to attracting new demographics of people. For example, Ottawa Tourism recently launched Discover Ottawa, the first official city application in the country, which to date has received more than 10,000 downloads.

I sat down with Iannitti after his presentation to elaborate on some of the topics he discussed. In this interview, Iannitti answered the questions:

1. What are you doing through digital marketing to change the perception that Ottawa is safe and boring?
2. How specifically has social media supported your efforts?
3. What are you doing, if anything, to encourage business professionals to come to the city and is there a larger goal to encourage businesses to set up shop in Ottawa?
4. How are you proving a businesses case for your activities?

I hope you enjoy, and please post any and all comments below. I will loop Iannitti into the conversation to answer your questions.

* A special thanks to Emily Armstrong from RocketOwl for filming this interview.