Ideas

Over 300 tourism professionals, community leaders, educators and advocates gathered to take stock of where West Virginia tourism stands and, more importantly, where it’s going.

Predictive analytics gets talked about as if conditions are perfect: clean data, cleanly segmented audiences, platforms that behave consistently. Most campaign environments don’t look like that. Conversion tracking is often recent or unavailable. Platforms optimize differently. Yet decisions still have to be made before the data feels “complete.”

Your organic traffic is going to go down. We have been saying this for years. Most people heard it and moved on. Not because they disagreed, but because it felt far off, and when your numbers still look okay, it’s hard to lose sleep over a problem that hasn’t landed on your desk yet. That’s…

If you aren’t telling your brand’s story, you’re missing a real opportunity to create buy-in with your audience. And I’m not just talking about mission statements. Sure, that’s useful, but it’s essentially the handshake. It doesn’t pull anyone in for the hug. We have to go deeper than that.

We love seeing this state show up for itself, and this was a moment worth amplifying.  The Brad and Alys Smith Outdoor Economic Development Collaborative at WVU brought West Virginia’s first-ever Outdoor Economy Summit to Charleston in mid-February, and the response said everything.

If you’ve ever worked with a creative agency, you’ve probably heard that question. You know the one — said with a mix of hope and urgency: “Do you have the RAW file?” We know, we know. We sound like a broken record, obsessed with those three little letters. But here’s the thing, they matter. A…