Jim is the President & CEO of Response Marketing Group, a consumer-data-focused marketing agency in Richmond, Va. As such, he is responsible for relationship development and account strategy at the independent agency, which offers data analytics, predictive modeling, and multi-channel services. The agency serves several clients in the financial services, travel/tourism, and insurance sectors.

With over 30+ years of experience in the marketing and advertising industry, Jim is a nationally recognized speaker at conferences and events such as the Forrester Marketing Conference, Direct Marketing Association, Public Relations Society of America, and the Southeast Tourism Society. Jim is considered a thought-leader on the value of data insights married to relevant messaging to the target audience.

Jim also leads the Travel and Tourism practice for RMG, which includes clients such as Arkansas Tourism, Georgia Tourism, Visit Jacksonville, St Tammany Parish, The Ritz Carlton, and Marriott International among others.

Prior to Response Marketing Group, Jim was Senior Vice President at The Allant Group in Chicago, IL from 2010-2014. He led the Strategic Consulting practice that delivered marketing strategy and high-level research to CMOs and brand managers at clients such as GM, Comcast, Nationwide Insurance, US Tennis Association, US Cellular, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and Wells Fargo. From 1999-2010, Jim was an agency partner in RightMinds a strategic consultancy in Richmond, VA serving national brands and emerging growth brands.

On this episode of Destination on the Left, I talk all things data with James Harenchar. Jim clarifies the types of data that are available, and how they help build predictive models and analytics that deliver a reduced cost per acquisition. He demonstrates how data has helped tourism marketers achieve better results with some recent case studies. Jim also walks us through the evolving nature of the direct response marketing industry, and how response attribution works in the digital world.

What You Will Learn:

How Jim leverages data analytics, predictive modeling for clients in the travel and tourism sector
Where Jim finds the data that we don’t have and the ‘secret sauce’ of matching it to messaging
How building relationships translates into better, more effective marketing
Why and how you should be differentiating your messaging for different audiences
Why consistency across your messaging, imagery, and CTA considerably boosts your advertising response rate

Engaging the Audience

In the travel and tourism industry, we are always looking to marry customer insights with marketing strategy and use the data we have more effectively. But in some cases, it’s the data we don’t have that would help me gain greater insight into what individuals are looking for from a destination or experience. It’s great if you have a first name and last name and an email address but if you don’t have any detail on gender, income, whether they have children or are an empty nester then it’s much more difficult to tailor your messaging and engage that individual that’s already in your database in a meaningful way.

Personalized Messaging

The relevance of digital marketing is more important than ever, so the more data you have on your client base the more likely it is that you will be able to personalize your ads. The direct marketing industry has evolved to where potential visitors expect the images and ads that they’re seeing to be focused on their interests. This is where data, analysis, and segmentation can help professionals in the destination marketing world achieve personalization more quickly and efficiently.

Website: https://rmg-usa.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharenchar/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rmgusallc/

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