Despite the inclement weather, Visit Mendocino County’s annual meeting, held at the Little River Inn on Jan. 11, welcomed a full house, including elected officials, vintners, cannabis industry leaders and members of the lodging, restaurant, arts and events industries.
One of the highlights of the all-day event was a rare visit to the region by Caroline Beteta, president and CEO of Visit California – the non-profit agency tasked with marketing the state as one of the world’s go-to travel destinations.
Beteta is also the strategic adviser for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development and is considered to be the principal voice for the state’s tourism and travel industry. She has been at the helm for nearly two decades and is credited for the exponential growth of the state’s travel industry, peaking in 2019 with $144.9 billion in economic benefit to the state.
Beteta was introduced by Travis Scott, Visit Mendocino County’s executive director, and administrator and treasurer of the North Coast Tourism Council. He told the attendees how Beteta has artfully guided the state through both incredible growth and numerous crises. Her presentation focused on how to continue and expand upon California tourism’s post-pandemic rebound.
Beteta began with high praise for Scott, who also serves as a member of Visit California’s Rural Committee. “Travis is providing excellent leadership for the North Coast,” Beteta noted. “Visit Mendocino County is a study in success. The level of sophistication on branding and destination approach are incredible, considering your limited resources. Travis understands the workings from the State perspective,” she continued.
Beteta went on to explain the overarching purpose of Visit California. “What is our role in this ecosystem? We do what industry can’t do for itself. It starts at the inspiration level,” she explained. “We raise awareness, drive demand, partner, and work through the ‘handoff’ so that people arrive at the Visit Mendocino County portal, with the dividend of booking travel and spending money.”
Beteta noted Visit California is just beginning to re-focus on international travel as concerns about the pandemic wane, but noted she is spending dollars judiciously on those efforts.
“We’ve re-entered the market, focusing mostly on Canada, Mexico and the UK’s primary, secondary and tertiary markets. Visit California is a global organization again.”
Beteta predicts it will be another two years for international travel to fully recover. “China was our Number 1 visitor market prior to pandemic. I’m hopeful to see visitor spending with China continue.”
With safety in mind, Visit California is working to employ statewide safety initiatives by publicizing a Responsible Travel Code. “This is very important, particularly with Covid. We want to continue to educate consumers globally.”
Beteta continued by explaining the agency’s commitment to “grow the pie of opportunity.” During the peak months of Covid, California was perceived as not being open to tourism whatsoever. “Florida shut down for just a few weeks. We were the only state that was shut down completely and had to come completely back. When I spoke with Governor Newsom about obtaining stimulus funding, it was Spring, 2021. We would go dark by July 1, 2021 because the industry had no money, but with the infusion of stimulus funds, we’d be able to catch Florida.” This is what occurred. She lauded the efforts of Senator Mike McGuire for his assistance in acquiring the much-needed stimulus funding.
To facilitate recovery, Beteta and her staff formulated a multi-tiered campaign. “We wanted to cast that net, drive that top-of-mind awareness” about California tourism. They produced a spot that ran before the Super Bowl kickoff game. “The spot aired pre-game when people were most engaged. It worked really well because we reached 50 million households, but it had to have legs beyond the Superbowl. We took a different approach with this entertainment-based advertising that made sense in terms of tapping into the incredible reality of California – this magical place where you can experience all you missed during the pandemic.”
The ad campaign featured a whimsical, eye-catching clip called “Am I Dreaming?”
“We used the iconic song from Queen – ‘Don’t Stop Me Now,” Beteta smiles. The ad was cut into three dozen iterations to engage any consumer using any digital platform.
“We’ve had 100 million impressions from this campaign,” she notes.
Tourism – both statewide and countywide – continues to be one of California’s most important economic drivers. A survey conducted by Dean Runyon reported California travel-related spending topped out at $100.2 billion from 2019-2021, with 927,100 travel-generated jobs and nearly $10 billion in travel generated taxes.
For Senate District 2, which includes Humboldt, Lake, Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, travel spending in 2020 was $2.13 million, with 29.2 thousand people employed in the travel industry and total state and local taxes totaling $223 million. “Though we are down from 2019, we appear to be coming out of this very nicely. I’m expecting very good news in the spring.”
California continues to be the Number 1 travel destination in the U.S., and Beteta credits the diverse approach Visit California is taking to attract many types of visitors.
“Our ‘Road Trip Republic’ campaign was produced right as we were going into pandemic. Mendocino County is featured in the campaign. It has been very popular, especially with the resurgence of family road trips. It features great scenes of the county, using Steppenwolf as the theme music. We are the ultimate road trip destination – for stopping, staying and shopping. Mendocino is referenced in eight ‘Dream Drives’ which include emotive and instructional Spotify playlists.”
Beteta notes that family travelers spend 56 percent more than non-families and stay at destinations longer. For that reason, Visit California launched a “Kidifornia” ad campaign. “This is very important to our overall visitor mix, and it has the highest return on investment of our ad spending campaigns.”
She spent some time discussing the agency’s Rural Marketing Program.
“This program adds depth and richness to destinations. Our rural committee and tourism marketing grants have been put back to pre-pandemic levels, which allots $44,000 for the North Coast this year. You’ll have choices on how to spend that. Travis and his peers are choosing to focus on retargeting, which is really important with your web strategy. People search on Google. We had 33 million followers prior to pandemic. Our ads retarget when people do organic searches. Your discipline on improving your web site has paid off.”
She explains that the agency looks at visitor engagement through a copious lens of key performance indicators. “Web strategy is a platform for people to get interested in California and start their walk down toward commitment and deciding where to go. We have provided 12,000 partner handoffs to connect the Visit Mendocino site, as well as 152-plus social media posts and 748,000 website pageviews. The destination strategy includes what, where and when you want to be promoted. She applauded Visit Mendocino County’s robust staff, which is prepared to take advantage of the leads sent to them by Visit California.
“We continue the walk of engagement. We don’t live in a static world. When visitors are looking at destinations, they’re looking at multiple destinations. We’re bringing them into more content. We’re providing an annual print and digital California Road Trips guide which is distributed through Travel and Leisure, Food and Wine and other publications.”
“As we get into the digital world, visitor guides are really important. We’re still producing 750,000 guides which are inserted into Parents magazine, at our Welcome Centers and Travel and Leisure magazine, as well as providing digital downloads of the exact guide.”
Another new venture is “Native California,” a tribal tourism partnership. “We’re creating a content portal about sustainable Native experiences around California. We’re very excited to work with these communities. So many people don’t even realize they are having travel experiences on tribal lands. This is an incredible area of opportunity for tribal establishments and talking about the original stories of California.” Beteta is confident that Mendocino County will develop partnerships with local tribes and become part of this program.
Finally, Beteta addressed the importance of stressing sustainable travel, which is particularly important for Mendocino County residents. Visit California’s Sustainable Strategies are encouraging tourism organizations to shift from destination “marketing” to destination “management,” thus balancing the visitor economy with residential quality of life, environmental impacts and infrastructure impacts.
Mendocino County is peppered throughout the Visit California website, from a podcast on the Wild North Coast to a “Mendocino Explore” page as well as a “Mendocino County Road Trip” video, and more.
For more information on Visit California, log on to https://www.visitcalifornia.com. For information on Visit Mendocino County, log on to https://www.visitmendocino.com.
