The Durango Area Tourism Office has hired Suzanne Harrison to oversee marketing strategy and is aiming to increase its focus on digital advertising.
Harrison, who has more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience, will oversee the organization’s domestic and international destination marketing strategy.
Frank Lockwood, DATO executive director, said in 2019 his group will increase digital marketing and sales efforts and will most likely redirect advertising dollars from print, billboards and broadcasting toward digital and social marketing efforts.
Already, Lockwood said in the past few years the print advertising budget for DATO has declined from $150,000 per year to $40,000.
Focusing on digital and social advertising, Lockwood said, is aimed at reversing a decline in lodgers tax collections and boost flat sales tax collections in Durango.
Through October, the last month for which numbers are available, lodgers tax collections for Durango were at $894,077, a 5.2 percent decline from the same point in 2017. Sales taxes collections were just shy of $20.05 million, a 1 percent increase from 2017.
Lockwood said he had not set any goals or benchmarks for increases in lodgers or sales tax collections based on DATO’s increased social media spending, but he said digital and social media are valuable data about people who click on advertisements.
“They are measurable and provide you with analytics,” he said of digital advertising.
In 2017, Colorado posted a 41 percent increase in visitation, more than twice the 20 percent growth rate of U.S. travel since the recession in 2009, and Lockwood said that provides Durango and the region an opportunity to maximize digital and social media advertising.
Harrison moved to Durango in 2012 from Seattle and spent four years as vice president of sales with Ballantine Communications, Inc., before starting her own agency, Convergency Marketing, in 2016. Harrison also has held leadership positions with Time, Inc. and Amazon, among other marketing and information technology firms.
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