City of Kent launches website to attract tourists

The tourists are coming! The tourists are coming!

The city of Kent launched a new website (visitkent.com) earlier this year aimed at bringing more people to town to spend their money.

“It really is a neat website,” said Councilman Bill Boyce, who helped lead the campaign to get the website going. “We’ve been working on this for eight months or more to get the right people in place. It is uncharted territory but we have metrics in place to make sure the website is fitting our needs.

“If something is happening in Kent, you can hit the website and find out what’s going on in Kent.”

Kent’s Lodging Tax Advisory Committee, which serves in an advisory role to the City Council and mayor, came up with the idea to market Kent. The seven-member board includes Boyce, three hotel industry representatives and three members involved in activities funded by the lodging tax.

The state levies a 1 percent tax on hotel rooms sold in Kent and returns that money to the city. The tax raises about $200,000 a year in Kent and must be spent on tourism or to support community events that bring people to the city.

Genesis Marketing, of Spokane, designed the website with a $15,000 contract from the city’s tourism budget. The council’s Economic and Community Development Committee on March 9 approved a $30,000 contract with Genesis to update the website and market it to people in Central Washington, Spokane and North Idaho, Portland; the Seattle-Tacoma area and the lower parts of Canada.

“This is a change to a more modern way of marketing on the web,” said Councilman Dennis Higgins at the committee meeting. “I’m anxious to see how it works and I am very glad to see the metrics built into the contract. I will be watching it closely. It has been a long-time coming. What we were doing wasn’t working and was a waste of money and this seems like a really wise expenditure.”

Higgins told a story about how his mother-in-law a few years ago would travel around the Pacific Northwest and check out hotel display racks for tourist brochures.

“She’d see brochures for Auburn and Renton and she’d say, ‘I don’t see a Kent one,'” Higgins said. “We were putting our advertising money into a black hole.”

Kurt Hanson, city economic development manager, told the committee the money will be well spent by Genesis.

“We’re all applauding our recent unveiling in January of the visitkent.com website,” Hanson said. “In a successful marketing campaign or a website in this case, you just don’t launch it and forget it.”

Genesis will use social media sites in an attempt to reach more people with ads on Facebook, Google, Bing and other sites.

“With this contract it will be an introduction of an advertising campaign on those offshoots for marketing and all will feed into the visitkent.com website,” Hanson said. “It’s uncharted territory for us but something I think is long overdue.”

Quarterly reports from Genesis to the Lodging Tax Advisory Committee will keep members informed about hits and visits to the new website and what areas hoteliers should focus on.

The website includes tabs for discover, plan, explore, stay, events and culture. Points of emphasis in the city include Kent Station and the ShoWare Center.