The Raccoon River Valley Trail Association is seeing a surge of requests for more information about the trail from people all over the Midwest and beyond in response to our marketing campaign. The RRVT’s reputation as a tourism destination seems to be spreading far and wide.
COOPER, Iowa, June 15, 2010 – The promotion and marketing that the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association is doing for the trail and its communities seems to be paying off early this summer.
Carla Offenburger, RRVT Association president, noted that promotional ads were placed again this spring in several publications, including the Central Iowa Tourism Region Guide.
“From that ad, we’ve recently received requests for more information from people in Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Florida,” Offenburger said. “A few weeks ago, a first round of requests for more information came from Wisconsin, California. And of course we’re hearing from peole all over Iowa all the time.”
Groups from the Kansas City and Twin Cities areas have booked rooms along the RRVT while they’ve had trail adventures during the spring and early summer. On Monday of this week, a trails enthusiast from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, called and asked for information about renting bikes for his family for a few days of riding on the RRVT in late July.
Many calls and e-mails are being received after people have discovered the trail via our site on the Internet, and many others have seen the RRVT Association’s messages on the site www.bikeiowa.com, which is like the central information clearinghouse for all bicycling enthusiasts in this state.
It is the association’s plan to build and sustain a marketing effort throughout the Midwest, having at least a weekly media presence in the Des Moines metro area, and trying to reach the national audience via the Internet and occasional feature stories in far-flung publications and on their ‘Net sites.
