This final council meeting of 2024 adopted the 2025 budget and tax levies, established legislative priorities, and heard public testimony on housing inspections and employee wages. All consent agenda items and ordinances passed unanimously (9-0) with one abstention.
The council approved 24 resolutions en bloc by a 9-0 vote, including:
Six members of the public spoke:
Before the regular meeting, the council’s Finance Committee received a presentation from Belmont Partners and Lawrence & Schiller on the city’s tourism marketing contract (ending 2024). Highlights over three years: 31% growth in total neighborhood trips, overnight trip growth from 60% to 63%, 242 million paid media impressions, $13.1 million in direct revenue from paid media, 587 earned media articles, and 15 industry awards. Councilors expressed appreciation and asked about transition of creative assets (city retains all).
All right, we'll get started in one minute. Evening, Mike. Okay. And let's just kind of put that in conditions. All righty. We are just at about 6.15. So I'd like to welcome our friends from Belmont Partners up for our final finance committee meeting of the year and our opportunity to hear from the tourism partners we've had for the last few years. So I want to welcome Shelly and her team up, and I'm not sure exactly who's gonna start, but whoever wants to start can approach the lectern and take it away. All right, great. Thank you, uh President Randorf, uh, Councilor Forsman, all counselors, thank you for the opportunity to present to you tonight. Uh we're excited to share our work from the past year as well as the overall results from the uh last three years uh as we wrap up our contract at the end of the year. So uh we'll be going through these uh slide presentations pretty quickly, but we'll be sure to save time at the end for questions and discussion. Uh so our agenda for today um we'll do some quick introductions, uh, we'll walk through our content contract outline and the work we've done this year for each element. We'll discuss the results and how we've moved the needle over the last three years, um, and have time for question and discussion at the end. So quick introductions or reintroductions for most of you. So I am Megan Anderson, I'm a director at Belmont Partners. I lead our uh Duluth work and our tourism and hospitality work. I am joined here today by my uh colleague Shelley Lysick, who is a partner at Belmont Partners, along with our uh partners at Lawrence and Schiller, uh Laura Mitchell, who is VP of Marketing, and Kiri Bustler, who is a senior media strategist, who you will hear from today as well. So the first line item from our contract um for the last three years was to put together a comprehensive marketing plan. And with that, I will invite Laura to come up to share more about that. Thanks, Megan. Uh you can see here on the screen this maps out our annual plan for 2024. Uh the colorful chart at the bottom shows when we had all of our efforts running or in market. Uh starting with our overall business goals, we track things like tourism tax revenue, uh, hotel numbers from STR, uh, our distribution of visitors throughout the city, and the length of stay of our visitors, so how many how much time they're spending at uh neighborhoods and certain points of interest. Uh, for the marketing strategy, uh geographically we select markets based on different times of the year. So our peak strategy targeted primarily um in-state, and then we had three different tiers of out-of-state markets as well. Uh our primary markets that had more broad awareness channels, secondary markets which were more targeted digital only, and then we had some testing with our look-alike markets, um, where we had expensive media markets, but we're able to create lookalike audiences of people who had engaged with our media in the past to be highly efficient with our dollars. Uh and then with shoulder, we paired that back a little bit uh for a budget budgetary reasons, uh primarily targeting in-state, um, some of those primary and secondary markets, dropping off look-alikes, and then our holiday and winter efforts, really focusing in on our drive about a 250-mile radius for in-state our primary markets, then narrow down secondary markets, and then we also have evergreen efforts that run nationally all year long. So if anybody's searching for trips to Duluth or vacations to Minnesota, that sort of thing, we are in front of them with the Duluth message. So you can see how that shakes out throughout the year. Our paid media goals, we track things like earned our medium engagements, ROI from our OTA or online travel agencies like Expedia Priceline, that sort of thing. And then we also have earn media going all the time. So that tracks things like number of clips, the impressions, UVM and local, regional, and national coverage that we gain. Our second component of the contract includes audience profiles. So you've seen these three audience profiles. These are the usual suspects. We target our ready to roam audience, our up for adventure, and our kids in connection audience. So these are the three primary groups that we are in front of. We've evolved those throughout the years as we've learned more about how they engage with our media, which channels are best to reach them, and what's been most effective. So those are broadly the same, but know that we've been uh tweaking those over the past uh three years as well. Uh the third pillar is creative campaign development. So we are in our third year of the Love It Like We Do campaign, uh which kicked off in early 2022 and are continuing to evolve that. So in this past year, uh we launched what we call My Duluth, which is an offshoot of our Love It Like We Do campaign. So it's still based on that local flavor of our Duluthans, uh, but just gives a new voice to that. Uh, we really tried to prioritize diversity in people, place, industry, that sort of thing with the uh the content that we featured, um, really showing those firsthand Duluth experiences told through uh documentary style, so really using our Duluthans to use their own words and tell uh visitors why it's a great place to visit. Uh so you can see the four that we targeted, or not targeted, that we uh featured Jonathan Thunder, Sandy Larson, Eric Gert, and Galen Lee. Uh with that, I'm gonna ask Kiri to come up and talk a little bit about the campaigns and uh the media that we use to target uh during the different seasons. All right, our first campaign of the year um is really focused on winter. So I was targeting our January and February months, trying to get people to come up here, enjoy you know, skiing, other winter recreation. Um, a cool highlight of that last year was some weather activated display banners, so it served when it was snowing, which was a little tricky last year with the snow, um, but we still made it work a little bit.