PlaceID for CX: A Customer-First look at the Future of Destination Marketing

Experience our proprietary way of mapping effective storytelling and engaging brand experiences.

A New Approach to “Destination Marketing”

Destination marketing, at its core, is no longer solely about promoting place over service; it is the action of familiarizing people with their (re)location dream before they step foot in that new location – whether it be temporarily for pleasure, or permanently for work. We call this new holistic approach to creating exceptional pre-qualification experiences for B2C and B2B brands “PlaceID for CX”: the experience of creating a sense of place for somewhere previously unvisited—or a place that deserves a re-visit with a refreshed perspective. It’s about how we help brands help people imagine & realize a destination dream prior to packing their bags or considering putting down new roots.

Connecting People to the Places that Redefine Their Lives

Relocation – for business or pleasure – is transformative. And, at times, difficult.
At Mindstream Interactive, our customer-centric approach has allowed us to fully understand what coming to a new destination means for people traveling for pleasure and people relocating for business.

Our approach considers not only the holistic digital experience, but the motivations, messaging and technology necessary to surround searchers in the hunt for a new place to visit, or a new place to live.

This starts with our Strategy team working with our clients to define the target audience, envision the most exceptional customer experiences and prioritizing the tactics to get there with Customer Core^®. This is the proprietary system we’ve developed to provide brands with the artifacts that will impact their organization - actionable tools that can be used to drive decision-making across the organization daily in real-world, applied situations. Completely reimagined Personas, Journey Maps and Impact Charts that focus on the actionable, not the theoretical.

Personas

We take our personas beyond the surface, which allows us to understand not only who customers are in detail, but also what motivates them and how to most effectively connect with them. The purpose of personas is to act as the grounding touchstone for ensuring that all parties involved understand why we make customer-centric decisions and how they should be prioritized.

Our personas are focused on revealing the psychographic behavioral underpinnings of the mindsets of groups of people first and then the segmentation and user flows of their journeys.

Journey Maps

We believe journey maps should effectively connect dots and fill gaps throughout the entire brand ecosystem by shedding light on how the brand’s footprint does – or doesn’t – align with the ways in which customers want to engage. We build these NOT around flat, linear “day-in-the-life” patterns that ultimately reveal little except for routine – but based on the group mindsets of the key people who want to interact with a specific brand. We think about things like what people are Dreaming about, or how they Organize their searches for products, or how the Browse for new experiences. These are the places where the Insights live that can fuel your approach to content.

Our journey maps are designed to be versatile and flexible to simultaneously tell a clear, impactful story, while also facilitating problem-solving beyond the “static” path sitting on a page.

The Impact Chart

Missing from many persona exercises is their actual purpose – to be a direct call to action for experience making. We use impact charts to draw a straight line between what we know about the customer’s needs and what will actually move them to taking actions that move the needle for a client’s business.

Impact charts align opportunity and friction points with actionable recommendations throughout the footprint, prioritized and aligned with the KPIs they will impact. Understanding the relationship between experiences that provide customer and business impact reveals the all-important tactics needed to incrementally innovate an experience that many strategic engagements miss.

This is Critical to both B2C and B2B Marketers.

For B2C, we look through the Enjoyment & Employment lens at the Travel, Leisure, Business, Relocation and Jobs/Careers categories.

For B2B, we look through the Economic Impact lens of Destination Marketing, Tourism, Site Selection and Workforce Talent.

Some of our work in this area has included our client partnerships with JobsOhio.com, VisitCalifornia.com and ExperienceColumbus.com.

If you would like to talk further about this subject, or have us put together a proposal for your brand, please get in touch with our Director of Client Growth, Wes Meermans at wmeermans@mindstreaminteractive.com or 614-754-2006. Yes, that’s his direct email and phone number (we don’t do generic, so you’ll never get sales@ from us).