Five Reasons B2B Research is Indispensable for Destinations

Knowing all about travelers’ habits is important for destinations, but B2B research into the needs and expectations of other audiences is just as important. Consider the travel trade, meeting planners, media professionals, and other non-consumer groups who help position your destination in front of consumers.

What do you really know about how they operate?

Learning more about these audiences and how to work more effectively with them will advance your marketing goals by allowing you to make B2B decisions that are backed by insight. Your research could be linked to bettering your brand perception among the travel trade and media, developing quantitative and qualitative measurements to track progress, or holding focus groups to better understand the needs of meeting planners. Even post-event feedback studies following a fam trip or networking event provide intelligence that allows you to structure more impactful programs.

Deciding how to conduct B2B research will vary greatly based on your destination’s needs. What’s ultimately important is to remind your destination and its stakeholders why this research is worth the investment.

1. Create ambassadors for your destination

To maximize return on investment, destinations need to understand the deciding factors for the groups that will be spokespeople and ambassadors for their destination and arm them with the information that will be most useful in selling the destination to the final consumer.

Providing the right data, showcasing the right stories, highlighting the right offerings, and understanding how they wish to communicate is all key to ensuring your destination stays top of mind for future partners, whether they are meeting planners or tour operators. Effective B2B research allows you to ask these questions objectively and at scale. Making sure to give them what they need ensures that your destination is the easy decision for them.

2. Good research makes better marketing strategies

Conducting surveys and interviews to get in touch with your B2B partners and clients at scale gives you the opportunity to set learning and marketing objectives from the beginning. You can measure what’s most important to your clients regularly to see how the landscape is shifting. 

This objective information can be crucial to understanding the broader landscape that your clients are navigating in order for you to serve them best. Let B2B research guide your marketing efforts from the beginning rather than shooting in the dark and hoping that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow.

3. Maximize investments grounded in research

Attracting meeting planners, tour operators, and other B2B audiences to work with your destination costs money. So make every dollar count. Research empowers you to target your audience and increase engagement more effectively. In turn, clients and partners will spend more money on the product that serves them better than the rest—so be that product that they need! 

Organize and moderate focus groups, for example, so you can sit down with clients to understand what is working for them and where there is opportunity to evolve. These conversations can provide a more objective picture of the business landscape, and allow your destination to channel funds and energy where they are most needed.

4. Outclass the competition

It may not be obvious, but your competitors are spending time and resources to better inform their marketing and strategy via B2B research. Staying ahead of the game—and ahead of the competition—means investing resources to build the research that will inform your strategies.

In addition to consistent market research about your destination specifically, consider co-sponsoring a wide sweeping report like Winning Strategies where DCI surveys meeting planners and decision-makers to understand the most effective marketing and sales strategies for reaching meeting planners.

5. B2B partners are just people

Events and fam trips are an important part of marketing your business and brand as well as staying top of mind, but it isn’t the end of the story. People want to give feedback and feel like they are being listened to, as well.

Satisfaction surveys and interviews after events or fam trips will allow you to uncover what went well and what needs to be improved on for future events. Post event research will ensure you’re making the best use of your time and resources. They may be B2B audiences, but businesses are made up of complex people with complex decision-making processes that research will help uncover. That research will help you structure your B2B marketing efforts in a way that will best resonate with meeting planners, media and the travel trade.

Get your B2B research strategy started today with DCI’s Research team. Get in touch with Robyn Domber at robyn.domber@aboutdci.com to learn more about how our agency and its more than 65 years of experience can benefit your destination’s B2B outreach.