Destination marketing experts believe artificial intelligence will have a significant impact on the sector, according to a new report.
Sojern's State of Destination Marketing 2024, released Monday, revealed that 49% of destination marketing organizations (DMO) are expecting a significant impact from AI.
In content creation and personalization, 37% believed it will have a high impact, while 44% said some impact. In campaign creation and optimization, 29% said it will have a high impact versus 47% that said some impact.
Meanwhile, in data analysis and interpretation, 38% said they see a high impact while 43% said some impact.
The report covers further trends in DMO marketing with marketers saying 20-40% of budgets are devoted to creating content with the remaining 60-80% going towards paid marketing to promote that content.
Search and social media marketing dominate paid media, and nearly all DMOs, 96%, said they view social media advertising to be of high or average importance, and 95% said the same for search. Programmatic came next at 86% followed by influencer marketing at 74%.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
Despite the recognition of the importance of social media marketing, TikTok is seen as one of the top three social marketing channels by only 29% of DMOs.
Further insight from the report includes that more than half of respondents, 54%, view data as the most valuable resource for marketing planning, and 38% said the same of data in campaign reporting.
When it came to the challenges of using data in marketing, respondents flagged the lack of data integration across channels as a top concern followed by the high cost of acquiring data and limited access to quality data.