THUNDER BAY - A trip to Pukaskwa National Park in the coming week by representatives of three Canadian media organizations is just the latest in a summer-long series of tours of Thunder Bay and area by writers and other media people.
Thunder Bay's tourism manager, Paul Pepe, says the area is on track to be visited by over 30 individual "travel media influencers" this season. "That gives us a reach that our marketing dollar, our traditional advertising dollar, just would never give us," Pepe said in an interview with Tbnewswatch.com.
He listed some of the out-of-area media that have been here so far: "This summer we've had National Geographic come through the region, we've had PowerBoat TV, we've had SnowTrax (Television), we've had a UK-based magazine—Geographical—which is a major magazine, send one of their writers a couple of weeks ago."
Other visitors this year included Motorhome Magazine, a Milwaukee newspaper and Trout Unlimited.
Pepe said a number of bloggers and "social influencers" have come through as well, people with Instagram or blog followings reaching into the hundreds of thousands of people.
He said these are people who travel to the northwest to experience the outdoors, local attractions, events, or the culinary scene "and they write about it, and the content that's generated from that helps us sell the city in a much more authentic way."
Assessing the impact and value of these visits is more than a matter of guesswork.
"For example," Pepe said, "Outside magazine—probably the world's predominant outdoor adventure magazine—sent their senior editor here last year...and he spent a couple of days with us, and we got an eight-page article."
In determining the value of that kind of exposure, tourism marketers consider what it would cost them to buy eight pages worth of traditional display advertising.
Tourism Thunder Bay also works closely with provincial tourism promoters in measuring performance and tracking content.
"The beautiful thing with all the online content, the influencers, the bloggers, is that we can track click-throughs, we can hot-link our individual tourism operators that they showcase, and they see bookings, they see real business that comes out of this," Pepe noted.
A National Geographic feature on paddling in Wabakimi Wilderness Park is set to begin circulating in the coming weeks in North America, Germany and the UK.
"We're seeing an increase in UK and German media over the last two to three years," Pepe said.
He named those countries as the two key overseas markets for growth and development.
But some out-of-the-ordinary European exposure recently came from Belgium.
In what Pepe described as one of his staff's "funnest" experiences of the year, Tourism Thunder Bay worked with a Belgian producer who was creating a series of TV ads for a telecom company there.
"They wanted to film on location here in northwestern Ontario. That's something that's non-traditional for us but it gave us fantastic content and a great story. It may not be aired in a key market necessarily, but that digital media on social media, on Facebook, is transferrable to many of our key markets."
