A big part of destination marketing organizations involves working with economic development organizations to lure people to visit their city, and eventually move here and settle down. The hope is that whether people want to come here for fun, for a convention or for school, they're going to come here first to visit and then will see why its such a great place to build a life and a career.

Experience Columbus partnered with Columbus 2020 and launched the #lifeincbus campaign, an external marketing campaign that targets a young audience in specific markets where relocation potential is high. The target demographic of this campaign is young transitionals 25-30 in age, influential in their social circles, entrepreneurial, creative and willing to relocate in the next three to five years. The campaign features a lifestyle portal website, lifeincbus.com that is designed to expose Millennials to what Columbus has to offer. The website functions as a portal of aggregated content from local media outlets, Instagram and twitter hashtags and other curated content. #lifeincbus focuses on the Chicago and D.C. market because they are large population centers with a heightened awareness of Columbus. There are also Experience Columbus convention sales offices in each city as they are home to many large associations. There are wallscape billboards, transit-based advertising in metro stations, elevator videos in high rise office buildings and online rich-media ads targeted toward local blogs and website with a young readership that give the viewers a glimpse of what life in Columbus is like. The thought behind this is when these young transitionals get to the point where they're tired of their long commutes and high cost of living and they're thinking about relocating, we want Columbus to be in their consideration. Skift recently did an article on this campaign. Read more on The City Using Its Tourism Board To Lure Young Professionals to Relocate.