Carol Waller stood at the front of a convention room full of local business owners and city leaders Tuesday wanting to know the game plan for attracting guests to Sun Valley this year.
"Ninety-five percent of what we do in marketing you don't see here," said Waller, executive director of the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau, at a marketing summit at the Sun Valley Inn.
She said promotional efforts target people outside the valley and have also started to break through the box of conventional advertising, such as magazines, and gone viral.
Carrie Westergard, chamber marketing director, said the chamber has 4,000 Facebook friends and 1,145 Twitter followers, not to mention 146,000 unique visits to the Web site—www.visitsunvalley.com—last year. "Unique visits" means the number of people coming to the site, rather than the number of individual hits. She said the chamber has 24,000 subscribers to its e-mail alerts.
Sun Valley City Councilwoman Joan Lamb said the networking sites will be money well spent because print advertising reaches people already in the know about Sun Valley. She said Facebook and Twitter speak to the younger crowd.
Jack Sibbach, Sun Valley Resort's director of sales and marketing, said the resort is also focusing its efforts on the Internet and networking sites this year. He said the resort spent $250,000 in magazine advertising last year.
Sibbach said the resort's Web site videos were getting 10,000 hits a day at the opening of winter season.
The chamber's main message was that advertising must be a community-wide collaboration.
"If we're all singing the same song, people are going to hear it," Waller said.
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Peter Scheurmier—leader of the chamber's marketing task force—said the past year has been one of "trying to figure out priorities." To be successful, he said, everyone needs to be on the same page, marketing the area as the same thing—Sun Valley.
"It's the name we go by," Scheurmier said. "It's the name we choose to go with."
Waller said this year's goal is merely to maintain visitation levels.
"But that will be difficult in this climate," she said of the economy.
But, according to John Drake of Boise ad agency Drake Cooper, it will take more than working together and promoting "Sun Valley" to stand out among the horde of resort destinations scrambling for fewer visitors.
"How do we stand out and not just yell louder?" Drake asked.
He said the area must emphasize its array of year-round outdoor activities, sunny weather and beauty—and do so all in one package. Drake said the 2009-10 "The Fun Never Sets" campaign has achieved that. The main image of the campaign is a collage depicting a sunny sky, River Run Day Lodge perched on Bald Mountain, a mountain biker with the head of a deer, whitewater rafters riding a cloud and much more.
Drake said the chamber struggles in grabbing the attention of the younger crowd. Sibbach said the resort experiences the same thing with those 55 and younger.
"I had no idea where Sun Valley was before I came here," he said.
Waller said the chamber hopes its new effort of using local professional athletes, such as mountain biker Rebecca Rusch, as marketing tools will garner some attention. Rusch said at the summit that she would be promoting Sun Valley and summer deals while touring.
"It's a destination," she said in a promotional video. "You have to work to get here. There's no freeway running through the front yard."
Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com
From left, entrepreneur Toni Bogue, Blaine County Recreation District Executive Director Jim Keating, Environmental Resource Center Executive Director Craig Barry and Sun Valley City Councilwoman Joan Lamb listen during the marketing summit Tuesday. Photo by David N. Seelig
