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Roan Mountain Visitors Bureau is pleased to announce the new Roan Mountain section appearing in the winter edition of the High Country Press Visitor Guide. “It’s a really unique take, presenting ourselves as an integral part of the overall ‘Mountain experience’, as opposed to a competing entity”, said Mike Hill, Bureau Chief at the visitors’ bureau, “we initially put this project together with the goal of capturing share from the largely ignored High Country NC visitor market that touches our border. This approach fits really well with the current push to unify regionally in order to have a larger set of attractors with which to market ourselves.
The North Carolina High Country generates over $650 million dollars in direct consumer spending each year. By emphasizing that we actually link to this market geographically, and are only separated by imaginary county and state boundaries which aren’t really barriers at all we hope to capture an increased share of that business.”
The visitor guide section is the final component of a Mountain Electric SEED grant project that also developed and distributed a “Visit Roan Mountain” brochure to 28,000 Mountain Electric service addresses and 81 High Country visitor racks. “Most marketing efforts fail to address the need to generate a return commensurate with the advertising dollar invested”, Hill said, “in our case, our budget was tiny, so we had to get really creative to expand our reach to a broader audience than would typically be available on a budget this size. By leveraging the efforts of well funded NC marketing concerns, our goal becomes infinitely more achievable-instead of motivating customers to traverse thousands of miles to visit Roan Mountain, we are simply asking them to travel the last mile to reach us…the heavy lifting was done for us by others.
When asked how effective the campaign has been, Hill stated that due to absentee ownership of many electric service addresses, they have received direct feedback from Raleigh NC, Florida, South Carolina and Georgia…and none of our small businesses went out of business, even in the midst of the Covid crisis. “I’m super excited to see the impact of our new visitor guide section over Q1 of 2021”, Hill said, “there’s so much to be gained by realizing the power of being ‘part of’ something as opposed to being ‘in competition with’ something.” 
Hill is optimistic that the marketing grant will be renewed for 2021.
The High Country Press Visitor Guide will hit the streets on December 8. For more information click to www.VisitRoanMountain.com