By HOLLY GASKILL
As the Wells County Chamber of Commerce continues its tourism efforts, they recently launched a new marketing tool — a website.
The website, visitwellscounty.com, acts as a one-stop location for visitors and locals to see Wells County attractions, events and businesses.
Audry Dudley, project assistant and tourism coordinator, and Chad Kline, economic development executive director, shared the website and several other branding components at the most recent county commissioners’ meeting.
“Anymore, people visit a place virtually before they visit it physically,” Dudley said. “This website puts our foot in the door to show people the many things we have to offer.”
The majority of tourism in Wells County is one-day trips from visitors living within 50 miles, Dudley said. She hopes that, by creating these easy-to-access resources, visitors can be made aware of the many opportunities in the area.
The design of the website was created with the county’s new branding style tools, which include a new color palette, several logos and the phrase “Wandering Wells County.”
A committee had worked together to choose everything to reflect the community and its strengths. The color scheme — brown, orange, blue, black and sage green — was chosen to feel natural and inviting. Forms of the tourism logo also feature a bison, tying in one of the county’s unique attractions.
The theme of “wandering” stemmed from the idea that, with so many great local businesses and attractions, people can always find more to explore.
The Chamber is currently working toward including these logos and themes on merchandise, like stickers, hats and shirts, to spread a sense of local identity both within Wells County and for tourists.
Kline and Dudley also spoke about the success of their recent publication, Visit Wells County. The travel guide included local attractions, stories and events. According to Dudley, over 7,500 copies were distributed through The News-Banner and an additional 915 copies have since been distributed through local businesses and stakeholders.
The website and travel guide were also designed in partnership with Holly Clabaugh of Trade Design Co. in Markle. Dudley said the Chamber hopes to update the publication on a semi-annual basis.
Looking forward, the Chamber is working on producing two videos for the new website to market Wells County activities during the day and night. They will also be working on photographing the area attractions to use the photos for further marketing efforts, starting first on social media.
These marketing efforts were all items contracted in 2020. However, in the future, Kline said they will need additional funding for this to continue.
Though social media marketing can be done for free, Kline said there will be costs associated with the upkeep of the current deliverables, like regularly updating the local tourism guide and maintaining the website. Additionally, any push to market to other areas comes with a cost.
“At that point, we’ll need to talk about what’s next,” Kline said. “Right now, there’s not really the funding in place to do the marketing necessary … we want to push some of those things out beyond our county, beyond the people that are seeing our site, so there will be some other funding needs going long term.”
holly@news-banner.com
