Millennial Meeting Planners and How CVBs Can Engage With Them
Destination Analysts’ latest meeting planner research found that Millennial-aged planners are less engaged with CVBs compared to those in older generations–a critical issue for the industry. During our webinar on July 21st, Vice President, Kimberly Vince-Cruz, interviewed a panel of meeting planners about their opinions on why this is and what CVBs can do to build and better the relationship with these planners.
Watch the video below for highlights from this discussion.
Don’t want to watch the video? Read what they shared here:
Why Millennial meeting planners appear to be less engaged with CVBs:
– “Millennials are very much technology driven and the CVB-planner relationship is so personal—it is building up a relationship, it is building the networks, it is getting to know each other over time. It is not a matter of sending an email or going to a website and submitting something or clicking a button. I think those of us who are a little bit older have been around for a while and have built up that network base—we’re more used to picking up the phone, shooting a quick email and setting up a meeting vs. hoping to go to a piece of technology to get the information. So I think just by the way of how they were brought up, the habits that they formed based on what was available at their fingertips, it has affected how they work with people vs technology and information. Again, that’s my personal perception.”
– “How we even market our conference to our emerging leaders is we use social media and Instagram with a lot of photos. It is a completely different market and it was a hard sell to our leadership team on why we’re creating a completely different campaign to market a meeting, but that is how they access information. They are not going to look at a robust email, we have had to really develop our social media campaign and that is how we were able to communicate with them.”
– “In my experience just working with my clients who are Millennials, and I work with quite a few, I would say, and this is really shocking, 80% do not know what a CVB is, they have never heard of a CVB. I always source through CVBs, they are completely unfamiliar with the services and they just they do not have the knowledge.”
How CVBs can engage with Millennial meeting planners:
– “I think if a CVB wants to build a relationship with Millennials and find out what is important to them, I really think advisory boards are beneficial because you are going to get in front of them. There are also organizations in our industry. There is an award and magazine that comes out every year and it is called 30 Under 30. It is the top 30 planners under the age of 30 and if I worked for a CVB, I would get that publication and I would start reaching out to them. Our industry is still based on relationship. Just start becoming their friends and build a relationship and find out why are they not knowledgeable and what would they like to see from a CVB.”
– “I took a class on virtual meetings and learned a lot of information on how to go virtual. Something they talked about for promoting a conference that could really work well for promoting knowledge and use of CVBs is create a persona. It’s a character that is based on a real demographic and use that persona to market your conference, but in this case you could even market the existence of CVBs. Create a persona based on Millennial demographics and use that in your social media to grab the attention of Millennials to make them see anything you put out there to have them read further or get further engaged.”
