MANITOULIN ISLAND—The 63rd annual edition of Manitoulin’s stalwart tourist guide, This is Manitoulin, rolled off the presses earlier this spring and distribution of its 82,500 copies began immediately, as usual.
This year, 52,500 copies of the tourist guide and lure book have been distributed directly to households in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), from Oshawa to Oakville, in addition to Ontario’s capital city.
They were delivered to subscribers of the Globe and Mail newspaper throughout this key sector of Ontario’s “Golden Horseshoe.”
Additionally, a massive social media campaign targeted this same demographic beginning the weekend prior to the Globe and Mail distribution and continued for a full week.
It reminded readers that This is Manitoulin magazine was to be part of the upcoming Friday’s Globe and Mail and also highlighted the tourism website, www.ExploreManitoulin.com.
This is Manitoulin is published by the Manitoulin Publishing Co. Ltd., also the publishing parent of The Manitoulin Expositor, and retired publisher Rick McCutcheon explained that this additional targeted distribution has been made possible through a partnership with Destination Northern Ontario (DNO), the province’s Northern Ontario tourism marketing arm.
“This is the second year that we’ve been pleased to partner with DNO,” Mr. McCutcheon said in an interview last weekend.
“Last year, we also printed several thousand additional copies of the magazine and, with DNO’s partnership, focussed on seven individual markets in Northern Ontario, Eastern Ontario and Southwestern Ontario with targeted household distribution backed up by mass print media advertising campaigns in all of those same markets.”
“This year,” Mr. McCutcheon continued, “we decided to use a similar delivery method but used Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, in the GTA region.”
Last year, Manitoulin Publishing Co. Ltd. had both direct anecdotal and online feedback on the success to the Manitoulin tourism industry of the extended distribution of This is Manitoulin magazine.
“This year,” Mr. McCutcheon said, “we picked Toronto and region exclusively to target because, through the pandemic years when so many people in our province looked at ‘staycations’ because of the circumstances, Manitoulin Island was newly-discovered by this south-central Ontario market. This has been borne out by both a flood of new people seeking new holiday destinations here, plus the demand for Island real estate, also largely stemming from this same southern market.”
“It is the job of This is Manitoulin magazine to convince new visitors to consider Manitoulin for their valuable vacation time,” stated Mr. McCutcheon, “with the support of Destination Northern Ontario again in 2022, we believe we are on the right track to placing and keeping Manitoulin high on the list of priority destinations as Ontario’s Island Retreat,” Mr. McCutcheon added.
Dave Patterson, webmaster at The Expositor Office, offered some highlights from the targeted digital media campaign.
“The first two days of the campaign, we reached 52,300 people,” Mr. Patterson said, “with a post-engagement (comments, clicks, shares) of over 2,500.”
“This also had an impact on visits to www.
ExploreManitoulin.com,” Mr. Patterson said, “where traffic immediately more than doubled and that has remained the case.”
