Hitting the road for CVB

Sunday, January 21, 2007

The Convention and Visitors Bureau is packing up for a long month of marketing and advertising for the cities of Sikeston and Miner.

We are loading up our cases and shipping them to our first show at Lakeland, Fla. There, we'll have the opportunity to visit with over 30,000 "snowbirds," who migrate to Florida each year for the winter months. It is a great place to meet these people who travel through our area both coming and going. We want them to know what all we have to offer. And, hopefully, get them to stop on their way.

They usually are retired and have plenty of time to stop and look around. So we'll tell them about our nice hotels, restaurants, museums, shopping and all the fun events that go on around the area.

Once we've completed the show and packed up our booth for shipment to the next show, we'll catch a flight to South Padre Island, Texas, where we will have the same opportunity to visit with the snowbirds who winter there. This will be our first time to visit with the Texan snowbirds, but hopefully the show will be as good as the Florida one is for us.

Before heading back to Jacksonville, we'll once again pack up our booth and ship it home because we won't need at the next tradeshow. The Jacksonville Florida tradeshow is completely different from the snowbird extravaganzas.

This tradeshow has prescheduled appointments with bank group leaders. Prior to meeting with them we go on-line and research which banks will be our best connections. The Bank Travel Conference takes both the banks and the cities information and places it on-line at their Websites. The banks who are interested in what we have to offer in our area will go on-line and request a meeting with us and we do the same.

For instance, one thing we look for while researching the banks are those to the north, south and east that are heading to Branson and are around eight hours away from Sikeston and Miner. We are only allowed seven minutes to get our message across to each group leader and during this time, we will give each on a profile sheet and a visitors guide of our area and invite them to bring their groups here to experience Southeast Missouri .

After we return we'll be quite busy here getting follow-ups done to all those who have requested information out to them and catching up on the activities here that we've missed.

So if you run into a guest or visitor while we're out be sure to tell them our tourism director is out of town, but you're sure glad they are here.

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