2023 ‘FEELINGS’ CAMPAIGN: Serves as the North Star to Promote Sustainability and Puts the Art Community Center Stage

By Laura Bradley, Director of Marketing & Sales, Destination Door County

This year, values-based marketing has served as the foundation for our goals and objectives and is the driving force behind our strategies and tactics. It leverages built-in attributes like community identity, cultural DNA, creative energy, and values. It conveys how a visitor can plug into the feelings and energy of the people, culture, and local communities.

Creatively, our north star for 2023, is that ‘feeling’. We all know Door County evokes a truly special feeling that’s unique for everyone. But what we want to convey is something deeper. Those feelings that pull visitors to come back time and time again. The feeling that those of us that live here experience but sometimes find hard to put into words.

This creative approach allows us to share seasonal inspiration to promote our shoulder seasons and encourage more evenly distributed visitation throughout the year. It provides an opportunity to communicate our community’s values through messaging focused on sustainability, responsible travel, and the preservation of our local history, culture, and natural environment. It reinforces the Door County brand, stories, and unique character of the 19 communities and the people that call this place home.

winner will receive $2,000, the opportunity to be part of our artist-focused video series and their piece used in Door County marketing throughout the year.

The ’Feelings’ campaign also inspired our 1st annual Art in the Door Contest. Art in the Door is a call for local artists to create a piece inspired by a specific feeling that Door County embodies for them. A jury will choose 8 finalists and the public will vote on 4 winners to represent Art in the Door 2023. Each

When it comes to executing our creative and media messaging, we first look at the data. Access to platforms that provide site analytics, subscriber list data, geo-location data, visitor spending, and booking data is essential to inform our media placement and mix.

Our core target markets are within a 6-hour drive radius, where most of our visitation originates. We also monitor and evaluate media placement in growth markets, leveraging any areas of opportunity so long as it aligns with our values-based marketing goals and objectives.

We choose a media mix that best and most effectively reaches our target audience out-of-county as well as visitors in-county to continue our sustainability messaging throughout their travel journey.

The 2023 summer campaign launched mid-April and will continue until June. Our shoulder season messaging ran Jan-Feb (winter), Mar-Mid-April (spring) and fall will begin in early August. The workforce recruitment campaign launched Mid-March and will run through April.

The marketing and communications team hosted a live webinar on April 18th, 2023. It highlighted how DDC positions and markets Door County, the data and research used to inform strategies and tactics, the important role earned media plays in extending our paid efforts, and how the creative campaign supports the Door County brand and key messaging. If you’d like to watch the recorded webinar, you can find it at DoorCounty.com/Partnership (under Partner Resources).