DIY Tourism Marketing Conference

By now, you have probably heard that Hurricane Helene has profoundly impacted our beloved city, Asheville, along with our entire region in Western North Carolina and areas throughout the Southeast. We are making progress toward recovery, but our lives and the lives of our neighbors, friends, family members, and colleagues will be forever changed. We are so grateful for the support of our tourism and travel community, and we hope you can join us in March 2025 as we rebuild and celebrate!

Effectively enticing visitors to explore your community, make a reservation, attend your events, and shop at your local businesses is tough enough on its own. It doesn't get any easier when the platforms, tools, strategies, and trends constantly evolve alongside consumer behaviors. Digital marketing in the tourism, travel, and hospitality industries requires skill, strategy, and creativity. That's why we created the DIY Tourism Marketing Conference and DIY 365: A Year-Round Learning Community.

In its 8th year, this conference provides the latest digital strategies, resources, and tools to help you reach potential visitors and motivate them to visit. In addition, we were thrilled in 2023 to introduce the developed to help participants attract visitors, increase lodging revenue, engage residents, and create vibrant local experiences. We’ve created this program to help you level up your tourism marketing and navigate competition, changing traveler behavior, and evolving digital trends with the support of digital marketing strategist and educator Sarah Benoit.

Our two-day event is in the heart of downtown Asheville, North Carolina, one of the country's fastest-growing tourism destinations. Enjoy the sights, sounds, and colors of the Blue Ridge Mountains while gaining up-to-date marketing knowledge and skills you can take back to your region, venue, tourist destination, or local business to implement immediately.

Book your discounted stay at this year's event venue, the Renaissance Hotel Downtown Asheville, and enjoy this Southern destination city's walkable restaurants, shops, and other hotspots.

You'll have the opportunity to learn from Chris Cavanaugh, a travel and tourism marketing strategic planning consultant and founder of , Sarah Benoit and Justin Belleme, co-founders of the digital marketing training program , as well as a host of industry experts in topics such as video, ethical marketing, AI, social media, local SEO, digital advertising, SEO, and more. These experts will show you how to tell your business or organization's story compellingly to reach the right audience and encourage them to take action.

Our curriculum features classes suited for marketing professionals and industry leaders in travel and tourism. Additionally, we provide content designed for hotels, attractions, and small businesses that want to attract visitors and residents alike. Our vision is for representatives from tourism organizations—their leadership teams, marketing staff, CEOs, owners, and other communications and PR professionals—to attend this event together. These groups can learn in a supportive and collaborative workshop setting.

DIY Tourism 365 combines topics from our DIY Tourism Marketing Conference curriculum, comprehensive Content Strategy Roadmap, and monthly artificial intelligence (AI) group training series.

With DIY Tourism 365, you’ll get:

Online Training & Coaching

• 12-month access to our comprehensive Content Strategy Roadmap curriculum—a library of proprietary video content and digital resources covering topics like SEO, social media, email marketing, and digital ad campaigns
• Exclusive, monthly live coaching and support sessions for an entire year with Sarah Benoit, providing you with personalized tourism marketing guidance

A Ticket to the DIY Tourism Marketing Conference (In-person or Virtual)

• The DIY Tourism Marketing Conference provides you with the latest digital strategies, resources, and tools so you can reach potential visitors and motivate them to visit.

AI Virtual Training Sessions

• Monthly hour-long virtual sessions about AI ethics, tools, and marketing implementation that feature different experts each month

We designed DIY Tourism 365 to address the challenges in your day-to-day marketing workflow by offering support, guidance, and practical experiences throughout your learning journey.

The conference's full schedule and session details are listed on .

Discounts are available for group tickets. For questions, contact the JB Media Institute at [email protected] or by phone at 828.490.9299 ext. 2.

Please Note: No refunds will be given to cancellations received after Jan. 31, 2025. Refunds before January 31, 2025, will incur the loss of Eventbrite processing fees. Tickets can not be used as credit for future events. Tickets can be transferred to another person's name, or in-person attendees can switch their ticket to virtual to attend the hybrid instead.

Host or Publisher JB Media Institute