ROOST reps detail how data analysis benefits its marketing of Tupper Lake

by Dan McClelland

In somewhat of a repeat performance of when ROOST leaders made a presentation to the village board last month, they were at last week’s town board meeting.

Accompanying Michelle Clement, regional marketing director, and Katie Lalonde, marketing director for Tupper Lake and Hamilton County this time was not ROOST Chairman Jim McKenna but the Lake Placid-based promotional agency’s chief operating officer, Mary Jane Lawrence.

Based on the amount of coverage the Free Press had given in that day’s issue to their earlier presentation to the village, the trio offered an abbreviated program of all their work to promote this community.

“We were here in the spring to give you an overview of our program and today we wanted to follow up on some questions you had then and what we do for research” to build our programs, Mrs. Clement began that evening.

“We are going to go over some of the data we use and Katie will go deeper into the support we give Tupper Lake.”

She said the data they gather and analyze is designed to drive many of the decisions they make on the best ways to “execute the marketing for Tupper Lake.”

Mrs. Clement said one of their new tools for data analysis is a program called Zartico that they began using this year. “It allows us to track mobile devices,”- not individual ones but a look at total devices used here on visits by tourists.

“It gives us a snapshot of where the devices are moving- but in full disclaimer, we are not tracking any one person,” she told the town leaders. It is designed to give a sampling of tourist movement here and across the region.

Katie Lalonde showed a Zartico slide that showed this year 15.9% of Tupper visitors were from the Albany, Troy and Schenectady areas and their average view of the local web site to the time of visit was 38 days in advance. Fifteen percent of our visitors came from the Big Apple and their view of the web site averaged 33 days until their visit. Visitors from Rochester represented 8.4% of the visitors to Tupper this year and their average view of the site came 49 days before their arrival here. Syracuse visitors represented 11.8% of the tourist trade here this year and their average “view to visit” was 41 days.

Within each of those Designated Market Areas (DMAs), it can be accounted for how much each area spends in Tupper Lake, Michelle noted. “For example the Albany area accounts for 31% of the total visitor spend here- cash or credit cards. “That spending also skews much younger people than visitors from New York City.”

Many of the Albany visitors are young families, and so ROOST marketing directed to bring those folks here includes more family-oriented activities and those things will be promoted about 38 days ahead of any planned visitation.

She said too that their information about New York City that they use to coax those people to visit here includes a slightly older visitor with a higher income demographic.

“So we’ll do more of a higher end packaging- using some of our same attractions, but just alter how we package them!”

The Syracuse DMA is much like Albany area with a slightly smaller family income where visitors may be “more price savy” and looking for less expensive things to do on their visits here, according to the marketing pro. “They may be looking, for example, at a close to home destination where they can get a big bang for their buck!”

“So we’ll package our market a bit different” for them to address those goals.

Michelle said her agency also mines “credit card swiping” and other tourist expenditure data, which are very important to their task of “fine tuning their marketing for Tupper Lake.”

Another tool they use is what is called “web site analytics” which tracks who uses the Tupper Lake web site, how long they are on it, and what things, in particular, potential visitors are looking at, she explained.

ROOST, she said, does an annual leisure travel study” which gives it a look at the people responding to their e-mail blasts and their marketing campaign. It gives the staff members feedback to determine the “return on investment” from specific campaigns.

They showed another slide which showed a graphically-strong image of where people come from around the northeast to visit the Wild Center each year. The analysis showed the other places those visitors go when they are here and around their region during a typical visit. Those places included the Olympic jumping complex, Whiteface Mt., the Alpine Mall and Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, Fish Creek Campground, the Tupper Lake Municipal Park and Ausable Chasm.

“These are the kinds of things we look at to create those regional itineraries and road trips for people,” she explained.

“We also do a lot of surveying in gathering our research,” she continued.

She said between 2015 and 2019 ROOST did economic impact surveys each year for the Tupper Tinman, based on surveys sent to each participant after each year’s event. The work was resumed this year.

The survey this year showed that the tax collected from the 2023 event was up 53%. “Their total spend was up and more people were staying in Tupper Lake, compared with other locations. “-And that’s nice to see!”

“The average daily spend by the triathletes and the families was also up this year,” she said, noting that increased costs of goods and services has also increased this year with inflation.

“We get very specific feedback to provide you on the race. It includes improvements on the race by Laura (LaBarge) and her volunteers, and a lot of information that is bound to be helpful to the town.”

Michelle was asked if she felt that the blossoming number of short-term rentals in Tupper Lake has led to those growing Tinman numbers. She said the on-line booking reservations with those rentals are done somewhere else, and so those numbers aren’t found on the Zartico program which just tracks information generated locally.

“All this data tells us who to target, when to target them and the type of advertising content we want to direct at them,” she said of great value of this new data-tracking system.

Mary Lou Lawrence also explained they track closely the performance of the ads they place. “Our media buyer and our data analyst collaborate to look at how our ads are performing. If we see that something is not performing well and producing what we want them to produce, they make adjustments and they track it so there are as many eyes as possible who click through the activities of our campaigns.”

“We also track closely how many people go to our site, how long they are staying on it, and how they are moving through it,” Michelle added. She said ROOST launched a brand new web site for Tupper Lake last winter and it is constantly improving and adding new modules to it.

Katie Lalonde said ROOST recently took “a deep dive” into marketing with the publicity launched recently for the town’s Oktupperfest, working closely with Laura LaBarge and Christielee Geiger on the promotion of the October 14 event.

She said there was a lot “of push via social media” for the event.

Katie said with the new site at Flanders’ Park a ROOST photographer would be assigned to capture new footage for future promotional campaigns of the event.

“So next year’s ads will show the Brewfest, the hay rides, and all the fun there this year.”

Katie said ROOST has helped market the very successful Brewski in recent Februaries- growing attendance numbers into the thousands.

It will also be helping Town Councilman John Gillis promote a new cross-country race series this coming winter- six races at six venues. Details to come.

ROOST, she said, will again be helping the Sportsmen’s Club with digital registrations for the big Northern Challenge this coming February- as it has done every year in recent years.

It also does a number of e-mail blasts to past and present anglers of the big ice-fishing event.

She said ROOST also handles a similar e-mail registration program to promote the Tupper Tinman each year, with promotional updates during the 12 months before each year’s triathlon.

Katie also represents ROOST on the rail/trail preparedness committee created by Melissa McManus this past summer and on Seth McGowan’s Totality in Tupper eclipse preparation team.