What is Destination Marketing?

I ran across a respected website where they were talking about “Destination Marketing” where by implementing a model where the website that a person lands on when clicking through a search result becomes the end of their search - in other words, a resource that fits all of their needs and is essentially the first and last website they will need to surf to in order to get their questions answered and their problems solved.

In the past it has been all about attaining the top 10 positions on generalized keywords and keyword phrases in a particular niche. While the content was there, it wasn’t the total package because webmasters and companies were more interested in getting on the first page of the major search engines rather than wondering what would happen once that desired flood of traffic arrived.

One thing I realized was that our firm had always built Destination pages and used the idea of destination marketing to not only get our clients great results in the search engines, but also have the pages where visitors arrived ready to be a one-stop solution package that the company could offer as both a resource and a platform for selling products and services.

Getting high rankings we have long known is only half of the equation. In order to attain and maintain high rankings as well as the tops in customer satisfaction required that we develop marketing strategies that took into account both search engine optimization for landing pages always delivered with a focus on providing exactly what the arriving and prospective customer needs.

In a way, the definition of Destination Search Engine Marketing is a desired destination point. In order to attain this status every marketing campaign needs to achieve top rankings and go that much further to meet the needs and desires of a specific target audience. When a site becomes a resource that people tell others about and point and return to, it has become a destination website. In a way, it is like having a resource booklet with links, sources, materials, products and services that are aligned with the search engine message and always in total sync with why a customer clicked on the SERPs results.

When one looks at SEO, rankings are at the top. Getting good ranking is what it’s all about. Knowing that is the start and not the end all to search engine marketing, many companies are now going beyond the traditional search engine optimization techniques offering clients the ability to create exceptional webpages that are tightly focussed and designed to satisfy arriving web traffic.

By taking the focus off of just getting high rankings in the search engines and looking and dealing with the total presentation, this new term Destination Marketing is in many instances like our firm already at the forefront and on the cutting edge of this marketplace.

Having a name for this methodology is great and the article went further to back up what we’ve said all along. Destination SEM is developing a website that is a cut above the mediocre SEO only sites. It attains high search engine rankings because it is not only optimized but highly deserving of those search engine results. When visitors arrive at websites they will always feel that they have arrived at a site with the complete answer to their problems.

Clients, as a result, can offer products and services, rapidly build and maintain credibility and increase ROI at faster rates. Going at it from the idea that by building an incredibly good and useful site and as a result gaining high rankings is a concept that is building in popularity and one that we’ve used successfully for our clients for quite a while.

The big picture of utilizing a destination marketing approach comes in the form of additional exposure and positive company branding that a client will receive when they shift paradigms from getting high search engine rankings alone. Not only will traffic arriving be more satisfied, it is a known fact that people drive the Internet.

One satisfied customer will tell another one who will tell another. The flipside to that which many firms have suffered is that if they are only optimized to get a visitor to their site, their credibility will suffer and trust will decrease based upon what the site offers to an arriving web surfer. What that means is that conversion rates and sales profits will decrease according to the level of professionalism, friendliness and amount of useful information provided when visitors arrive.

Destination marketing is about asking yourself a question every time you start out to build a page or pages for your site: Do you simply want an average/mediocre site that only half delivers? Or, do you want a site that goes viral, where the amount of good, useful information transforms it into a resource that everyone is looking for, will bookmark and return to again and again.

Answering that question is what makes the difference between having a good site and a great site. Destination marketing is all about making fantastic, useful resource sites that are authorities in specific niches.