Effective city marketing strategies can assist local governments, tourist boards, hotels, travel companies, and other businesses by helping to attract more travelers to the city in question. In this article, you will learn more about city marketing, what it entails, and some of the main techniques that can help you boost tourism in 2026.
Table of Contents:
What Is City Marketing?
City marketing refers to a marketing strategy where a specific city is promoted to attract a greater number of travelers. It may also be designed to attract business investment and/or migration to the city. Generally, the intention is for marketing efforts to make your city stand out from other cities.
Successful city marketing strategies can serve to boost the local tourism industry. Aside from helping your city to stand out, city marketing can also help to enhance or improve a city’s reputation or allow it to be seen in a different light.
Why Is City Marketing Useful and Important?
The availability of airlines, travel websites, travel agents, and transport means it has never been easier to travel, and travelers have never had a greater range of options for destinations. This can mean that your city is competing with many other cities, towns, regions, and resorts for similar people with similar interests.
City marketing is useful and important because it can help promote your city as preferable to those other options by drawing attention to its unique qualities and plus points. It can help the local economy by increasing demand across the board, including hotels, restaurants, retail businesses, and travel agents. Travel & Tourism generated about US$10.9 trillion last year, around 10% of the global economy, and supported 357 million jobs, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. A large share of that value is concentrated in cities, where tourism is projected to directly generate up to 8% of all jobs in 82 major urban areas. For example, according to the Best City Brands Worldwide Report by Statista, the three best city brands were London, UK, New York, USA, and Paris, France.
When city marketing works, the impact on hotels is clear. New York City, for example, expects 64.3 million visitors, $51 billion in direct spending, and $79 billion in total impact, which directly feeds hotel demand, ADR, and RevPAR.
Simon Anholt, pioneer of place branding and creator of the Anholt City Brands Index, quoted in the City Destinations Alliance interview,
“City branding is a landscape made of culture and psychology, not economics and politics.”
What Is the Difference Between City and Destination Marketing?
The basic concept of city marketing is very similar to destination marketing, aiming to promote a particular location’s plus points or virtues to attract travelers. However, they are not precisely the same, as city marketing focuses on a single city.
By contrast, destination marketing could be focused on a city, but it could also include country marketing or marketing for a specific region or area. Nevertheless, the main objectives and techniques are similar. The World Bank’s Destination Management Handbook describes destination management as improving tourism yield (length of stay, spending, capacity utilisation), reducing seasonality, spreading benefits, and protecting environmental and cultural assets.
Table: Differences Between City and Destination Marketing
| Aspect | City Marketing | Destination Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Focuses on promoting a specific city or urban area | Encompasses broader geographical regions or attractions |
| Target Audience | Appeals to residents, businesses, tourists, and investors | Targets tourists and visitors primarily |
| Attractions | Highlights city-specific landmarks, culture, and amenities | Showcases natural landscapes, historic sites, and attractions |
| Economic Impact | Stimulates the local economy through tourism and business growth | Boosts tourism revenue and sustains local businesses |
| Collaborations | Collaborates with local businesses, government, and organizations | Partners with regional tourism boards and hospitality stakeholders |
| Marketing Channels | Utilizes city branding, events, and digital marketing campaigns | Deploys travel websites, social media, and tourism advertisements |
Who is Responsible for City Marketing?
Various individuals and organizations, like destination management organizations and groups, can be involved in city marketing efforts. Still, strategic responsibility will usually be delegated to city marketing organizations or city tourist boards. These organizations may have members or stakeholders, including local businesses and attractions, and these may pay a membership fee.
Such a group will champion the city’s interests, try to attract investment from businesses, and attempt to encourage tourism and other forms of travel to the city. On top of this, anyone with an interest in tourism management, such as hotels, can engage in city marketing on a more unilateral basis, promoting the city to attract custome20
City Marketing Strategies to Attract Travelers in 2026
Many different city marketing strategies are effective for boosting the popularity of a city and enhancing its standing as a tourist destination. Below, you will find 20 of the best tips.
1. Set Your City Apart From Alternatives
One of the most vital city marketing steps involves identifying precisely what makes your city stand out from other cities worldwide and pinpointing what aspects make it worth visiting. These could include famous landmarks, major tourist attractions, unique cultural aspects of the city, interesting architecture, and so on.
With more than 1.3–1.4 billion international tourist arrivals and $1.6 trillion in receipts, global tourism is almost back to record levels, and cities are competing fiercely for the same demand.
For example, New York City can boast landmarks like the Empire State Building and Central Park, entertainment venues like Madison Square Garden and Broadway, several sports teams like the New York Yankees and the New York Knicks, and special interest events like the New York Marathon. Try to find as many unique selling points as you can.
2. Be Clear on Your Target Audience
Next, all good city marketing strategies have a clear target audience or several key target audience groups. This requires you to carefully consider who is most likely to be interested in traveling to your city and their reasons for doing so. You may need to break this down into several example customer profiles.
For example, your city might be modern, with a thriving nightlife, helping it to appeal to younger people. Alternatively, it could be steeped in history and culture, appealing to older demographics, or a thriving business center, appealing to corporate travelers. It could be a retail hub, appealing to shoppers, or a domestic tourism hotspot.
Cities like Budapest and Bangkok have used wellness, spa, and medical positioning to attract longer-stay, higher-spend travelers, which directly benefits hotel RevPAR and ancillary spa revenues.
Identifying some core audiences can be invaluable in helping you to target your city marketing plan.
As Jeannette Hanna, founder of Trajectory Brand Consultants and place-branding strategist, says,
“Every place, large or small, is challenged to answer one simple, but powerful, question: ‘Why choose here?’”
3. Adopt an Analytical Approach
City marketing strategies are at their best when they are focused on evidence. City marketing organizations and their stakeholders can collect data for all purposes, from identifying who visits particular hotel or restaurant websites to using Google Analytics to find what pages engage people and which do not.
Hotels can identify their key demographics and their busiest times. Other travel companies can pick out trends in demand. You may even learn about the preferred devices people use. This information can be collected, analyzed, and used to create a laser-focused city marketing strategy aimed toward the right people at the right moments.
4. Focus on City Branding
As a concept, branding is largely focused on making things easy to recognize, identify, understand, and/or digest. Logos, slogans, color schemes, and consistent messaging all come under the ‘branding’ umbrella. It plays a critical role in most of the best city marketing campaigns because it helps a city stand out from alternatives.
The Brand Finance Global City Index notes that city brand strength combines inputs such as familiarity, reputation, business environment, liveability, and tourism attractiveness, and that strong brands like London, New York, and Paris command disproportionate tourism and investment flows.
A city can be branded in several ways. You might use a consistent logo or font that says something about your city. You could create a catchy name or slogan for a city marketing organization. The trick to good branding is sticking to it as much as possible because consistency and customer familiarity are crucial.
5. Balance the Needs of All Stakeholders
City marketing strategies will likely have many stakeholders, from city officials to local travel industry businesses, including hotels, restaurants, tour operators, and travel agents. To make the most of this, you must balance their various needs and give them reasons to become fully engaged.
Try to come up with specific elements of your city marketing efforts that each stakeholder can take a genuine interest in and assist with, and make clear to them how they can benefit from your wider strategy. See if you can collaborate with stakeholders on their marketing efforts and try to develop mutually beneficial messages.
6. Create a Compelling Website For Your City
A huge number of potential visitors to your city will turn to the internet for inspiration, which is why it is so essential that you create a compelling website to showcase your city and what it has to offer. A website can help you to promote your city’s unique selling points to your target audience in the precise way you want to promote them.
To provide some examples, images, videos, and blog posts can be used to promote specific city features. At the same time, you can also offer travel information, promote some of the city’s tourist sites, or offer vouchers or discount codes. Regardless of the precise content, your website must be mobile-optimized and deliver a great user experience.
7. Devise a Search Marketing Strategy
Many people seeking a city break or a city to travel to for any other purpose will research their options online, and search engines like Google are a common starting point. Ideally, when they search for terms related to your city, you want them to be directed to your own website so that they can read persuasive content.
The main way to achieve this is through search marketing. Paid advertising on search engines allows you to gain sponsored results on search engine results pages. At the same time, there are various practices, like targeting specific keywords, which can help you to place highly on organic search results. Greater visibility then leads to more website traffic.
Euromonitor notes that 66% of all travel bookings were conducted online in 2023, with mobile accounting for around 35% of online sales, and search is a primary gateway to these transactions. A yStats report projects that by 2026, 65% of global travel bookings will be made online, with mobile devices already driving over half of traffic to travel and hospitality websites.
Using SEO principles, enhancing the visibility of your videos and images may also be possible.
8. Encourage User-Generated Content
If you think about the times you have traveled to different cities worldwide, many of those trips were likely motivated by your desire to experience something. This is why your city marketing efforts should focus on promoting experiences, too, and a great way to do this is to try to turn visitors into ambassadors.
Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising research shows that over 80% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than paid ads. Academic work on tourism UGC finds a significant positive effect of UGC on destination image and visit intentions, especially when content is perceived as authentic and recent.
Think of ways to encourage your visitors to create their own user-generated content. You could promote a hashtag on social media or include a section on your website for videos or photos. Many potential travelers will find this kind of indirect marketing more convincing because it comes from ordinary people with no agenda.
9. Embrace Virtual Reality and Video
Virtual reality technology has a unique quality for city marketers because it offers the power to allow your target audience to actually experience aspects of your city. This can be achieved through virtual 360-degree tours of hotels or virtual reality experiences showcasing local attractions or landmarks. Grand View Research estimates that the global virtual tourism market reached about US$8 billion in 2024 and could exceed US$30 billion by 2030, driven by VR headsets, 360° video, and interactive tours.
More conventional video marketing content can also effectively showcase aspects of your city through a visual medium. The good thing about video content is that it can be easily added to YouTube and then shared across social media, your city marketing website, and various other platforms.
10. Make the Most of Social Media
Of course, social media is a powerful tool for promoting your city, with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn all offering different features and allowing you to reach different demographics. Social media posts can help you generate a global following, while advertisements and sponsored posts are also usually available.
A Statista study reports that around 75% of Gen Z and millennials use social media for travel inspiration, with platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube heavily influencing where people decide to go.
Using these features, you can target very specific people based on their interests, location, gender, places they have previously visited, browsing history, and more. You can also use social networking sites to get creative with competitions or quizzes to generate real engagement.
11. Collaborate With Social Media Influencers
In the modern age, so-called ‘influencers’ – those with loyal followers on social media – hold much marketing power. After all, many people have become wise to some of the more traditional advertising and marketing channels, and some are now much more cynical towards marketing from organizations or groups.
Influencers can have followings on various channels. While Instagram is the most obvious, other examples include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even their personal blogs. Collaborating with them makes it possible to market your city to people who may otherwise be out of reach, and they will also find the efforts more trustworthy.
Influencers also appeal to different demographics, allowing you to run multiple campaigns simultaneously. They are also considered effective for marketers. According to the State of Marketing Report by Hubspot, 89% of marketers who already work with influencers plan to keep up or increase their investment. Reporting on the “destination dupe” trend, The Guardian and other outlets showed how TikTok creators are driving demand to alternative cities that resemble famous destinations but are cheaper or less crowded.
12. Use Travel Websites to Promote Your City
While having a website to promote your city is valuable, highly effective city marketing strategies will involve reaching out to people who may be exploring their options, people who may not have settled on a location yet, or people who have not given any consideration to your city at all.
Travel websites offer an ideal way to achieve this. Statista data cited in The Times shows that the online travel market was worth more than US$640 billion and is expected to reach US$1.26 trillion by 2032, with OTAs handling more than a third of hotel bookings.
The precise travel websites you turn to will depend on the intricacies of your strategy. Still, they might involve widely-known international websites, niche interest travel websites, local travel websites, or travel websites that appeal to a specific demographic. Banner ads, video content, images, and virtual reality tours are all options for content.
13. Invest in Other Online Advertising Plans
There is a wide range of additional advertising possibilities in the online sphere, many of which may be worth exploring as part of a city marketing strategy. For example, display advertising can be used on third-party websites and platforms to generate interest or curiosity from people who may not be actively exploring city break ideas.
The IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report shows that US digital ad revenue reached US$225 billion this year, with digital video alone accounting for over US$52 billion and 23% of spend, and strong growth in formats like connected TV and retail media.
Content marketing is a possibility on both third-party platforms and your own website, and re-marketing techniques can be deployed to make sure you target people who have previously visited your city website or the website of hotels, restaurants, or attractions in the city to encourage them to make a final purchasing decision.
14. Promote Your City Offline Too
Finally, developing a robust offline city marketing strategy is important, too, as not everybody spends vast amounts of time online. Some offline media you turn to might include newspapers, travel publications, and television advertising. These efforts can also be targeted locally, nationally, or internationally.
During this process, it is also important to take the time to consider the best times to promote your city, and this should be based on data, experience, and sound logic. It could be that your city holds particular appeal in the summer months because of excellent weather, or it might be a popular location for Christmas, Halloween, or Thanksgiving.
City Marketing Example: ‘I ♥ NY’ campaign reimagined to ‘We ♥ NYC’ post-pandemic
15. Develop an Email-Marketing Funnel
An email-marketing funnel helps you turn curious travelers into loyal hotel guests. First, collect email addresses in a clean, legal way: city website, hotel website, free city guide downloads, Wi-Fi sign-ups, event registrations, and city passes.
Next, send a short welcome series. Share simple city tips, neighborhood guides, and “where to stay” ideas, including hotel offers that match the season. Before a trip, send helpful emails: how to get from the airport, public transport info, events during their dates, plus clear package links.
After the stay, send thank-you emails, feedback surveys, and “come back” offers. When the city and hotels work together on one funnel, every email can support both the destination brand and room bookings.
In a dedicated email programme for Travel Nevada, Noble Studios reported a 204% increase in e-newsletter sign-ups, 150% more visitor guide requests, 23% more sessions from email, and a 77% increase in partner link referrals after redesigning templates and strategy. This kind of funnel directly feeds city awareness, qualified traffic to hotels, and incremental room nights.
16. Use Signature Events and Festivals
Signature events and festivals help spread visitors across the whole year, not just in peak months. Cities can plan a clear calendar: winter lights in low season, food or music festivals in shoulder months, big sports or culture events in high season. When these events are promoted well, people have a reason to visit in quieter periods. This supports hotels, restaurants, and local shops.
Hotels can create special packages for each event. For example, “festival weekend” deals with early check-in, late check-out, and transport to the venue. Over time, a strong event calendar makes demand more stable. That means better occupancy, less price dumping in the low season, and easier staffing and planning for hotels.
17. Position the City as Sustainable and Regenerative
More travelers now care about the planet and their impact. A Booking.com survey found that 76% of global travellers want to travel more sustainably, and 43% are willing to pay more for sustainable options.
City marketers should tell a clear sustainability story: clean public transport, bike lanes, parks and green spaces, low-emission zones, and support for certified hotels. For example, cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam promote cycling, green building standards, and eco-labeled hotels as part of their brand, helping attract higher-value visitors who stay longer and spend more in local businesses.
Hotels can join this narrative with energy-efficient operations, credible eco-certifications, and local sourcing. When the whole city feels green and future-focused, it stands out and can justify stronger room rates.
18. Target Digital Nomads and Long-Stay Remote Workers
Digital nomads and remote workers stay longer and spend more time in the local community than typical short-stay tourists. They need fast Wi-Fi, quiet places to work, safe neighbourhoods, and easy visas or permits. The State of Independence report by MBO Partners finds that 18.1 million US workers now describe themselves as digital nomads, about 11 percent of the workforce and 147 percent more than in 2019.
Hotels can create long-stay offers with weekly or monthly rates, laundry access, kitchenettes, meeting rooms, and co-working corners in the lobby. Adding simple extras, like local SIM information or a guide to remote-worker meetups, makes the stay feel easier.
Over time, a strong remote-worker base helps fill rooms in shoulder seasons and weekdays.
19. Partner with OTAs, Metasearch Platforms, and Super-Apps
Online travel agencies (OTAs), metasearch sites, and super-apps are often the first place travellers search for a city and hotel.
Instead of seeing these platforms only as “expensive channels,” city marketers and hotels can treat them as powerful partners.
Work together on co-funded campaigns for key source markets and segments. For example, promote “48 hours in [City]” with a mix of hotels, attractions, and transport, all shown on one landing page. Hotels can join city-branded collections on OTAs or metasearch, such as “family favourites,” “business-ready,” or “eco stays.” This increases visibility exactly where travellers are comparing options.
Done well, these joint campaigns grow awareness for the city brand and bring more qualified bookings to hotel partners.
20. Apply AI and Advanced Analytics for Hyper-Targeted Campaigns
AI is now a real working tool in tourism marketing, not just a trendy word. An OECD brief says about 11% of EU travel agencies and tour operators, and 4% of hotels and food businesses, were already using at least one AI technology, and this share is growing fast. A Market.us study estimates the AI-in-tourism market at about USD 0.49 billion, with a forecast of almost USD 9.8 billion by 2033, which means very rapid growth.
For city marketers and hotels, AI can group travellers by interest, budget, and timing, predict when they will search or book, and automatically show the best message or offer. Hotels can add anonymised booking and stay data. Together, they can run very focused campaigns, such as “food lovers from country X in November”, and then measure the impact on occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, and total spend, instead of just counting clicks.
Travel Trends: Opportunities for City Marketing
The travel industry has been going through noticeable changes in recent years. With the technological developments that empower customers and give them the power to plan and book travel with a click of a button, businesses have realized the importance of staying current with the industry’s emerging travel trends. Technology has transformed travel experiences, and to remain viable, those working in this industry must use tech trends to provide their customers with better services.
In the article “Travel Trends: Opportunities for the Travel Industry,” learn how to thrive in the fast-paced travel industry by keeping up with the upcoming trends.
Technology Trends Relevant to City Marketing Strategies
No one can deny technology’s influence on the travel and tourism industry. After all, it is a technology that shapes the way people travel and the destinations they choose. The main goal of any business in the travel and tourism sector is customer satisfaction since they deal with customers daily. It is, therefore, important to keep up with the latest tech trends in the travel and tourism industry.
For detailed information on the role of technology in the travel and tourism industry, refer to this article, “Key Technology Trends Emerging in the Travel & Tourism Industry.”
City Marketing FAQs
Today’s interconnected world allows people to book trips and easily travel anywhere. It becomes important for your city and those in the local tourism industry to stand out from rivals, and city marketing can be effective for this. Using the tips provided, you should be able to put city marketing strategies into effect and reap the rewards.
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This article is written by:
Hi, I am Martijn Barten, founder of Revfine.com. With 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry, I specialize in optimizing revenue by combining revenue management with marketing strategies. I have successfully developed, implemented, and managed revenue management and marketing strategies for individual properties and multi-property portfolios.
