By Donald Wittkowski
On a typical summer weekend, about 50,000 to 60,000 visitors will pour into Sea Isle City, a beach town with a year-round population of 2,100. During peak summer holiday weekends, such as the Fourth of July, the number of tourists will balloon to 65,000 to 75,000.
Hoping to entice all those visitors to keep coming back again and again, Sea Isle’s Tourism Commission unveiled a $100,000 summer marketing campaign Thursday that features the theme “The Forecast is Fun!”
Although it is only January, Sea Isle wants tourists to already begin thinking about their summer vacations. The day after Christmas, the Tourism Commission placed a digital billboard on the Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia that beckons visitors with a summer beach scene and the words, “New Year’s Resolution – Spend more time in Sea Isle City.”
Like every other beach resort along the Jersey Shore, Sea Isle is trying to distinguish itself amid fierce competition for the tourist dollar. The summer marketing campaign is the centerpiece of Sea Isle’s strategy to separate itself from the clutter.
“Overall, I think our strategy is working,” said Mickey Coskey, owner of Seven Mile Publishing, the marketing consultant for the Tourism Commission. “If it’s not broken, enhance it. So, that’s what we’re trying to do for 2017.”
Sea Isle marketing consultant Mickey Coskey outlined the 2017 summer campaign to the city's Tourism Commission.
City spokeswoman Katherine Custer said visitors are attracted by Sea Isle’s family-friendly entertainment, nightlife, restaurants and replenished beaches. A $40 million beach project completed last year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers restored the city’s entire 4.5-mile coastline with fresh sand from First Street to 94th Street in the Townsends Inlet section.
“We feel we have the best beaches in Cape May County. Our beaches are outstanding,” Custer said.
Hardly surprising, beach images are a recurring theme in the 2017 summer marketing campaign. The campaign blends more traditional forms of advertising such as billboards, print media and visitor guides with a digital marketing strategy that recognizes the big, upward trend in mobile communication.
“You have to be on mobile if you want to play today,” Coskey told the Tourism Commission members during their board meeting Thursday.
Coskey released figures from 2016 showing that 57.3 percent of the people who accessed the Sea Isle tourism website visitsicnj.com used their mobile devices to do so. That compared with 30.5 percent of the web visitors using their desktop computers and 12.1 percent using their tablets. The number of visitors using their mobile devices in 2016 jumped 10 percent compared to 2015 and 23 percent over 2014.
Overall, Sea Isle’s tourism website had 264,496 hits and 173,689 individual visitors in 2016, both big gains over the figures in 2015 and 2014. In just two years, website traffic has more than doubled in both categories.
Demographic figures from 2016 showed that nearly 46 percent of the web visitors live in New Jersey, 31 percent in Philadelphia and about 4 percent each for Washington, D.C., and New York.
Tourism Commission members previewed a 30-second commercial that is undergoing final edits before it is launched to the public.
Preparing for the 2017 summer season, the Tourism Commission will ratchet up the marketing campaign on Feb. 1 by launching three new strategically located billboards on the Walt Whitman Bridge and I-95 corridor in Philadelphia. The one on the Walt Whitman Bridge will run for 20 weeks, while the two billboards on the I-95 corridor will stay up for nine weeks.
Sea Isle’s print advertising in 2017 will concentrate on a number of tourism publications that reach long-range vacationers. There will also be some print advertising to promote special events to the local market.
New for 2017 are rack cards and bookmarkers that will help showcase Sea Isle at highway service plazas and national travel shows, said Diane Merson, the city’s tourism representative.
Online promotions will be another key component of the tourism campaign, including web advertising, social media, video commercials on 6abc.com and even aerial footage of Sea Isle shot by a drone. Sea Isle’s Facebook page will feature a “countdown to summer” beginning Feb. 17 with daily posts.
Well before summer’s arrival, Sea Isle plans to have a big “Polar Bear Plunge” weekend Feb. 17-19 highlighted by the town’s annual chilly dip into the ocean. There will be a variety of visitor-friendly events throughout the weekend. Based on the turnout in previous years, thousands of self-proclaimed polar bears are expected to take the plunge, which is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 18.
Empty on a January day, Sea Isle's beaches will be teeming with tourists come summer. The replenished beachfront is featured in the marketing campaign.
