Marketing the City of Jacksonville as a destination is an ever-changing job.
Jacksonville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau Director Brittany Henry says that after the city, Jacksonville Main Street, the Chamber of Commerce, the Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corporation, and the Visitors Bureau all re-branded last year, there’s been more work to further show off everything that Jacksonville has to offer: “We have been very diligent in incorporating that new logo into all of our new ads. Every piece of development has been changed over. We have been working really hard just on that piece alone. If anyone has ever went through a rebranding process, especially for a destination marketing organization, it’s a lot of work to change everything over. A lot of efforts have spent this year on that development of building some new ads. We have over 20 publications that we are in statewide and regionally, and even in neighboring states. Just updating all of that marketing has taken a lot of effort. We’ve changed out almost all of our material completely.”
Henry says currently the focus is on the city’s tourism website jacksonvilleil.org and the visitors guide. Henry says new things are coming for both in the not-so-distant future: “We are going to have a brand new tourism guide releasing some time in June. Some exciting news – we will have a soft website relaunch happening sometime in the near future. I’m not going to tell anybody when it’s going to happen. I just want you to come out and visit our website and see how it is. We’ve been working very hard on getting that changed by adding an illustrated map. We’ve got new discount cards. Everything has that great matching look that’s really going to sell Jacksonville as a great place to visit along with it being a vibrant city. We’re very excited about all of those new changes that are happening. We are going to be launching a 6-month Google ad marketing campaign soon that’s really going to give us the ability to target not only specific areas but specific markets that we are looking to market to here in Jacksonville, as well as some of those special events we host.”
Henry says that the Visitors Bureau also recently joined the sports tourism marketing of Hudl in order to promote Jacksonville as a sports destination. She says a recent convention brought back several leads on events and marketing ideas that could help further support that niche market. She says historic tourism is coming back post pandemic, and that people are wanting to walk and bike to historical places a lot more now that travel is opening back up to its full potential.