The Missing Piece in Most Tourism Marketing Strategies

Paid media still works. But if you’re not building a creator program alongside it, you’re leaving your most powerful marketing asset on the table.

I’ve spent years on the paid media side of tourism, supporting destination brands across the country and before that, at Visit California. I’ve built campaigns, managed budgets, and tracked performance across channels. I believe in paid media. It works.

But there’s a pattern I kept seeing: creator marketing was an afterthought. A line item added late in the planning process, if it made the budget at all. And the destinations that treated it that way were missing something fundamental about how travelers actually make decisions.

With Popfly, Visit Salt Lake recently ran a creator program that generated 3 million views, 10 million impressions, and a 4.94% engagement rate. DMO’s can achieve results like that too with the help of a creator network.

👉 How Visit Salt Lake Generated 10M+ Impressions With Creator Marketing

What Paid Media Does Well

Paid media is targetable, scalable, and measurable. For destinations with seasonal pushes, event-driven campaigns, or competitive conquest goals, it’s an essential tool. The challenge isn’t that it stops working, it’s that it has a ceiling, and that ceiling is trust.

Ads tell travelers what a destination wants them to know. Creator content shows travelers what a destination is actually like. Those are two very different things, and travelers know the difference. There’s also the ownership problem: paid performance resets every budget cycle. The moment you stop spending, the reach disappears. You’re renting attention, not building an asset.

The Gap I Kept Seeing Across Destinations

Most Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) websites I encountered were heavy on informational copy and light on visual storytelling. A page full of things to do is useful, but it doesn’t move people the way a 60-second video of a real person kayaking a river at golden hour does. The inspiration gap is where creator content lives.

What to think about is how content moves across channels, how it gets repurposed, and what the shelf life is, especially for smaller destinations, because their budgets demand smarter allocation. Human-led content anchors a website, fuels email campaigns, and gives paid media something worth amplifying.

What Visit Salt Lake Is Getting Right

Visit Salt Lake isn’t running one-off influencer trips and calling it a strategy. They’re building a network of vetted creators with Popfly. The result: 80+ videos, 3 million views, 10 million impressions, and a 4.94% engagement rate. 

For context: paid social in travel rarely breaks 1% engagement. That gap tells you everything about the difference between content people are served and content they actually want.

And here’s what matters for anyone presenting to a board: Popfly doesn’t just help you run the program, it helps you prove it. Every campaign lives in a unified dashboard, engagement, cost-per-result, side-by-side creator comparisons so you can see exactly who’s driving impact. That turns “we did an influencer thing” into a defensible line item. 

What Tourism Boards Are Missing

The most effective creator programs are built around evergreen content, and that matters especially for destinations with shoulder seasons. Traditional paid media mirrors the calendar. Creator content doesn’t. A video posted in October can drive a March booking. A hiking reel from shoulder season can reframe a destination from “summer only” to “worth visiting year round.” For boards watching hotel tax revenue dip every spring and fall, that steady, always-on discovery is a meaningful difference.

A well-briefed creator produces photos, short-form video, and long-form storytelling that a traditional shoot can’t match at the same cost. It arrives with a built-in audience primed to engage. That content belongs on your website, in your email campaigns, and amplifying your paid media. Authentic content outperforms brand-produced creative on paid channels too.

Where to Start And What You Haven’t Considered

Once you’re in the Popfly platform, you're showing up with data that connects content directly to bookings. Heads in beds is the metric that drives DMO funding, and a well-run creator program gives you a clear line from a creator's content to a traveler booking a hotel room. That's a story boards can fund.

Here’s what most DMOs also haven’t considered: when your destination lives on Popfly, you’re entering an ecosystem of major outdoor and adventure brands like Backcountry, Osprey, Hyundai,  Camp Chef, all running campaigns with creators on the same platform. Your destination gets mentioned alongside the gear they’re wearing and the brands they trust, with content that can reach millions. That’s exposure most DMO budgets could never buy outright.

Popfly has the infrastructure. The creators are ready. The data is trackable. The only question is whether you build it now or play catch-up later.