Mobile Area Lodging Corporation

The Mobile Area Lodging Corporation (Corporation) collects assessments from hotels within its tourism improvement district (district). Assessments funded marketing and communications initiatives that promote tourism, focusing on increasing overnight stays in the city of Mobile. These initiatives include search engine marketing (sem), digital display banner advertising, online travel agency (ota) advertising, social media advertising, media print advertising, and sponsored public relations press trips. In addition, the Corporation funds capital improvement projects designed to enhance visitor experience and encourage repeat visitors to the district. These projects include; purchase of basketball/volleyball courts used by Mobile convention center, funding for africatown heritage house landscaping, and furniture, purchase of visit Mobile interactive kiosks, and wayfinding signage. Finally, the Corporation contracted researchers to perform destination research of visitor arrivals into the city, enabling more strategic usage of marketing and advertising funds in the future. The following highlights some of the results of these initiatives: -sem efforts have a campaign conversion rate of 30.88% which is currently performing over 600% higher than the industry average for tourism. -digital display banner ads created 28.6 million impressions and 38.4k clicks and a .13% ctr. -ota ads created 8.4 m in hotel bookings. -the cruise display campaign has 2.5m impressions with a .13% ctr. -the ctv & ott streaming commercials had 3.9m impressions, 3.83m video starts and 3.78m completes.