How One Holiday Campaign Changed This DMO’s Year-Round Marketing Strategy

Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge is already looking ahead to the 2026 holiday season. After last year’s strategy-altering success, who can blame the DMO?

For context, Virginia’s Blue Ridge is a mountain region in the western part of the commonwealth. The DMO encompasses five destinations, including the City of Roanoke, the City of Salem, Botetourt County, Franklin County, and Roanoke County.

It’s traditionally pitched itself to the “active, outdoor-oriented traveler who lives in a big city,” acknowledges David Aldridge, the vice president of marketing at Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Roanoke is about halfway between Charlotte and Washington, D.C.

For the 2025 holiday season, VBR took a new approach by marketing its shoulder season, from late November through early January. That meant looking at a different, and a little older crowd in search of a road trip. This audience “would be interested and shopping, food and drink, arts and culture [...] versus getting out on a hardcore trail,” Aldridge says.

The campaign led to “significant year-over-year growth with our hotel numbers for the time period of November and December,” Aldridge says, though he wasn’t able to specify an exact increase.

Growing Older

To say the least, it was a learning experience.

While Roanoke is appealing to young professionals to stay after college, relocate to the region, and build families there with the promise of after-hours hikes and weekends spent paddling, fishing, and mountain biking, there are other, equally important facets.

Aldridge admitted the campaign made the DMO's staff “recognize that we do have a lot of things that are appealing to an older demographic.” He adds VBR isn’t alone in that blind spot. “That’s a really big challenge for a lot of DMOs, if we’re going to be honest,” Aldridge says of speaking to older generations.

A New Marketing Approach

But aside from the audience, perhaps an equally impactful takeaway came from the campaign architecture itself.

Historically, Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge relied on a single seasonal message and one overarching landing page. After partnering with Tourism Economics to bring more data into its marketing strategy, the DMO adopted a multi-landing-page approach for the first time, creating tailored experiences around specific traveler interests. Some pages highlighted holiday shopping guides, while others showcased the region's unique Christmas light displays—the standout performer, according to Aldridge.

“That [landing page strategy] was extremely effective, and it helped lower the cost per click and cost per engagement,” Aldridge says. Thus, “our spring campaign was basically that on steroids because we have a much bigger budget.”

Under the banner "Vacation Starts with VA’s Blue Ridge," the campaign ran from late February through the end of April, again targeting road trip-ready travelers within driving distance—a lesson reinforced by the holiday campaign's success.

Rather than competing head-to-head in crowded markets like D.C., or Charlotte, the DMO concentrated on smaller regional markets within two hours’ driving distance, where it could stand out more effectively.

The expanded campaign also embraced the same segmented strategy, directing travelers to dedicated content with "multiple versions of creative” based on different interests, from restaurant and state park guides to ways to immerse themselves in the area's LGBTQ+ community.

It's a strategy the DMO plans to continue refining throughout the year.

A New Year-Round Mindset

A full year after the campaign that reshaped how the DMO thinks about its marketing calendar, Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge is applying lessons from the success

Rather than viewing late November through early January as simply an extension of fall or the lead-up to winter, the organization now sees it as a fifth season, a “standalone, as a unique time of the year,” Aldridge says.

That shift has changed how the team works.

Instead of building toward one all-consuming spring push in the middle of the year, the organization now operates with a “more balanced feel to the year” where every season has its objectives.

The lead-up to fall, however, continues to serve as a bit of reprieve within the schedule. It's the region's peak season, with roughly 80% occupancy across what Aldridge describes as its "signature properties."

As a result, the marketing team reserves its budget for increasing visitation at other times of the year. Look for a significant in October but efforts are already underway.

Just as importantly, the data-first approach that informed last year's strategy isn't going anywhere.

Working with Tourism Economics gave Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge visibility it had never had before, according to Aldridge. For the first time, the DMO could see where website visitors originated and whether they ultimately booked a trip after engaging with a Google search or social media ad.

In the end, the biggest takeaway wasn't a stronger holiday season, but rather the realization that one data-driven experiment could reshape an entire year's worth of marketing.

Photo Credit: Visit Virginia's Blue Ridge