How Visit Bentonville Earns National Media Coverage and Proves ROI with Cision
Discover how Visit Bentonville uses Cision for data-driven media outreach and communications insights to identify the right journalists, promote tourism experiences, and demonstrate the impact of earned media coverage.
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Challenge
Visit Bentonville faces the same challenge as many tourism organizations – with one notable difference. The area is home to Walmart’s global corporate headquarters, one of the largest retailers in the world, meaning the city is often associated with business travel as well. That means the team must work particularly hard to identify compelling stories and reach the right journalists – whether targeting leisure travelers, business visitors, or niche audiences interested in arts, biking, music, or food.
Solution
For years, Visit Bentonville has relied on Cision for data-driven recommendations on key media outlets, influencers, and management of PR campaigns across a wide range of channels. Cision also integrates directly with major third-party platforms such as Google Analytics, Adobe and more.
Results
With Cision, Visit Bentonville has secured coverage in Forbes, Outside magazine, and a wide range of national and niche publications. The team uses Cision for targeted media outreach and to demonstrate ROI to stakeholders.
Key features
Targeting media opportunities to promote tourism
“A lot of travelers who may come here are not necessarily tourists; they’re here on business,” said Missy Penor, Director of Communications at Visit Bentonville. “If they have the right information, though, they will also partake in what the community has to offer.”
Thanks to using Cision, Visit Bentonville has gotten a wide range of media coverage, including Forbes, Outside magazine, and many other publications.
Media outreach based on specific subject matter
Visit Bentonville’s key tourism areas include the arts, biking, music, and the culinary scene.
While some mainstream news outlets could touch on all of those subjects, there are also a host of more targeted and niche-oriented publications with specific audiences Penor and her team need to find. Cision makes it straightforward to promote a bike race or a culinary event, for instance.
It also offers deep insight into the best contacts to pitch this kind of coverage.
“It’s great. I really like how easy it is to create specific designated lists in the media world space, whether we’re looking regionally or from a national standpoint. It’s so nice to one-click your way through a list of outlets.”
Demonstrating ROI to leadership
Penor needs to regularly brief commissioners and other stakeholders about how she and her team spend their ad dollars and other budgetary resources.
“What’s important to me is to get a good economic counter of what the articles are worth to us based on how much I’m pushing information out,” she says.
“Cision helps me figure out what avenues to push towards – along with details about the when, where and how – in terms of what stories have an effect.”
Amplifying coverage
The Visit Bentonville team doesn’t rely on coverage alone in a particular outlet to do all the work. Instead, the team looks regularly at what has been written about the area in Cision and increases its visibility by offering highlights of stories in social media posts.
“It’s like a sort of bragging board that we can share with other organizations and entities,” Penor says.
Besides looking at day-to-day coverage opportunities, Visit Bentonville continues to grow in areas like sports marketing by becoming recognized as an ideal place for mountain biking events, baseball tournaments, swimming tournaments and more.
Given how firmly entrenched it is in the communications process, Penor says she can’t imagine life without Cision.
“Cision helps me do my job from a PR standpoint and getting information out. As I use it more and have connections with each news or media outlet, Cision gives me the opportunity to introduce myself to more people, and in a more specific way.”
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