Virginia’s Roanoke Valley: Smart Marketing, Lots to Offer

Downtown Roanoke’s historic center is just the beginning of what the area has to offer visitors. Photo by Clark Norton

Last week I spent several days in and around Roanoke, Virginia, hosted by the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau. The bureau brought in 19 travel writers and photographers from around the U.S. and Canada to discover what the area had to offer and, ideally, to write about it.

This is smart marketing. Publications large and small in states and provinces as diverse as California and Massachusetts, Colorado and Connecticut, Alberta and Ontario will carry travel articles about the Roanoke region that otherwise would never appear (most of the writers had never been there before). Some of the journalists were baby boomers, others were younger or older, so they’ll chronicle the destination from a variety of perspectives.

The press trip was organized by Geiger and Associates, a Tallahassee, Florida-based… Continue reading →