Heartland Travel Showcase, March 7-9, 2014

Kankakee County CVB will be attending Heartland Travel Showcase in Ohio this weekend. This showcase invites tour operators from North America that run tours to the Heartland region to  meet one-on-one with vendors like the CVB, to showcase their attractions. More than 100 operators from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada will be on hand at Heartland Travel Showcase.

Unlike many other shows, Heartland Travel Showcase allows the Kankakee County CVB to bring experiences right to the buying floor and build relationships directly with tour operators. In addition to personal appointment times with operators, we can showcase our area to a variety of groups during the open floor times. 

Group travel is strong in the Midwest, according to Heartland Travel, 92% of operators reported more customers in 2013 over the previous year. Heartland Travel also reports an average of $33,000 is spent per each motorcoach visit to an area. This includes money spent on lodging, dining, tickets to attractions/events, fuel and retail sales.

Contact the Kankakee County CVB to get more information on group travel.

Easy Customer Tracking; 1 - 2 - 3

Geocoding Bears Fans from Database

Have you ever wondered why they ask you for you zip code when you make a purchase at your favorite store? Unlike loyalty programs where a customer submits a profile and is identified with every visit to the checkout by scanning a card to compile a history of purchased items, geographical tracking is a way of seeing where your customers come from.

Geographical tracking, or geocoding is the process of turning an address, city, state, zip or postcode into mappable coordinates. This enables you to find trends, hot spots and cold zones in your marketing efforts. Where should you target next? What items are popular in a certain area. These questions are easy to answer when you visualize your sales data using a database mapping software.

Batchgeo is a free online mapping service that can create pinpoint maps based on your customer database; whether is includes full addresses, just city/state or even if it is only zip codes. You can even use databases you probably already have; attractions can use visitor sign in sheets, businesses can use customer databases and inquiry requests.

The Kankakee County CVB uses geotracking to measure ad results, see trends for a particular publication or track visitors to a specific event. Try it today to see how geotracking can help your business!