The Travel Vertical featured Visit Winona’s April Fool’s ad campaign and Laurie Jo Miller Farr interviewed Cynthya Porter, Marketing Specialist for Visit Winona. The focus was to show how DMO’s (Destination Marketing Organizations) are thinking differently. Visit Winona launched a spoof landing page http://www.mngators.com on April 1 and followed it with an email blast and a social media post to inform visitors of a new visitor experience: hand feeding and swimming with alligators. This campaign coincides with Visit Winona’s “Miami of Minnesota” campaign that “is a nod to the fact that we are on-average the warmest city in Minnesota, we are situated on miles and miles of beach (the Mississippi River) and we are located exactly on the Minnesota border where Miami is located in Florida. People locally have joked about it for decades – I just made it public :-)”
Porter’s response to the April Fool’s spoof: “The reaction has been HUGE! We soft-launched it through the e-blast and our Facebook page around 6:30 p.m. Thursday, and the website had more than 10,000 engagements on the Facebook post over the weekend plus about 1,000 click throughs from the MNgators site to the Visit Winona site.”