Biede: Creating the right tools is essential to bringing tourists to Florence
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Roger Biede
To promote tourism and awareness of Florence has been a major goal of mine since becoming a part of the Greater Florence Chamber of Commerce. Understanding exactly how to leverage Florence is an important step in boosting tourism in our area and recognizing what to utilize to bring in new visitors and residents to Florence has been one of the greatest challenges we have faced.
Small communities like ours need to be asking the question of how we can bring, not just any people, but the right people – people who will come because they want the experience what our community provides and will support local businesses while they are here. Connecting with the right tourists is often what it takes to bring in the kind of business revenue that our businesses need to support jobs for locals who want to stay in Florence and raise their families.
With this goal in mind, the chamber reached out to a number of sources including the Town of Florence, AZTourism, Local First Arizona and others to first get funding, but then work toward an advertising plan that worked for Florence. Smaller towns like Florence obviously differ from larger metropolitan areas in many ways, making it difficult to essentially “copy-paste” city marketing strategies and techniques onto rural areas like ours.
The first glaring problem we identified is Florence did not have a functional website promoting the town. We had the chamber website advertising businesses and the town of Florence website giving information, but not one that told our story. Needless to say, every town needs to have a well-thought out, well-optimized and well-functioning tourism website. Our public-facing persona on the web is one of the easiest ways to reach consumers and tell them why they should visit or move to Florence.
We decided that we wanted to capitalize on honesty and tell the people why we love our town. While small towns often imitate larger destinations in order to attract visitors, that would not work when it comes to Florence. We are unique and we know it. To better understand why people should come to Florence we formed a focus group of businesses owners, residents, students and government officials to discover why we live here, why we work here and why we came here.
We also asked the question, “What would you say to a person to get them to want to come here?”
The group met a number of times and had many spirited conversations with many different thoughts and ideas but kept coming back to the same couple of themes. We love the sense of community that Florence has, we love the residents that Florence has and we love the Western history that Florence has.
Visitors go to smaller destinations for different reasons than they go to big destinations. More often than not, visitors who go to small towns and destinations want to see the quirks about that particular place and get a sense of the everyday life of locals.
As stated prominently on the front page of the new website, we thought that coming to Florence is all about stepping ”into a place that is keeping Western traditions alive, from the oldest junior rodeo in the United States to craftspeople and ranchers who are living rugged, inspired lifestyles. Not just a theme park or a facade, a real Western culture thrives here today, where people are hardworking, and neighbors always have your back. Leave your pretenses behind and connect genuinely with a town that straddles the line between yesterday and today. Explore Main Street’s many well-preserved adobe buildings and over 140 historic buildings that all tell a story of its Old West past. Reset your clock and enjoy a slower pace where you can relax and reconnect with your family and loved ones. In Florence Arizona you are invited to set foot into a Western state of mind.”
But tourism does not happen overnight. It would be a mistake to think that just because we decided to “work on tourism” that tourists are just going to materialize. It doesn’t happen like that. We will continue to work on the website, add a page about our Autism Certification program and keep growing the page. The chamber continues to explore funding opportunities to expand our advertising reach and we hope that the website is just the beginning.
So, with a little out-of-the-box thinking, and speaking honestly about what makes Florence unique, a well-planned and thought-out marketing strategy can make a measurable impact on the town as a whole.
I hope that we have your support and look forward to seeing what Florence can become. Please reach out if you have ideas or would like to participate!
Roger Biede
Executive Director
Greater Florence Chamber of Commerce
