FRENCHVILLE, Maine — Aroostook County is seeing a boost in tourism and money spent in the region, thanks in part to organizations that actively promote the area as a seasonal destination.
Aroostook County Tourism, a marketing organization, demonstrated how it promotes The County to potential visitors from Maine and beyond during an all-day tourism summit on Wednesday.
Dozens of community and business leaders packed into the Frenchville Community Center for the summit, which featured presentations from several statewide and regional organizations.
ACT is a standing committee of the Northern Maine Development Commission focused on improving the region’s economy through tourism marketing and promotion. It is designated by the Maine Office of Tourism to promote and market the area.
Summit attendees learned the marketing appears to be working. Visitors to Aroostook County in 2023 directly spent $169,599,300 on accommodations, transportation, groceries, restaurants, shopping, entertainment and other expenses, an increase of 5.5 percent from 2022, according to data shared by MOT Deputy Director Hannah Collins. The County attracted 332,400 visitors last year, up 17.4 percent from the prior year.
One attendant asked Collins if there were any plans to get online influencers involved with marketing the region. She said they are working on finding a skilled snowmobiler who would be able to take pictures in the area and post them to Instagram.
Another guest asked how they are able to compile data for annual reports. Collins said they do intercept surveys, which involve gathering on-site information from visitors, to collect much of their information.
“We have a whole team of people,” she said. “They’re out there 12 months a year getting all of this data, and they supplement it with a little bit of online surveys.”
ACT Tourism Developer Jacob Pelkey gave a presentation explaining how he and others on the committee work to promote the region. Pelkey said they promote four seasonal periods in the region: early winter, late winter, early summer, and late summer. They then promote six activities during each of these periods.
“For example, early summer is what we are in right now,” Pelkey said. “So most ad placements are already out and running. We will be promoting trout fishing, high water season paddling, and agritourism — we just had maple syrup sunday.”
Some summer activities, such as ATVing, are in the late summer category since trails are not dry enough yet.
Pelkey said that it’s important to market Aroostook County as a unique part of the state. He said that while Maine may be known for foods like lobster, blueberries, and red hot dogs, these things aren’t really what people associate with The County. He said some distinctive county foods include potatoes, potato candy, fiddleheads, ployes and poutine.
He then gave an example of how he often needs to develop marketing plans for certain activities, like golfing, several weeks in advance.
He said that, on average, it takes about six weeks for someone to plan to come to the county. So if he’s marketing for golf, he would start by posting photos of golfing, and then follow that up with a link to the Aroostook County Tourism website. This would then be followed up with video of golfing and, finally, a link to a golfing event.
By having this content appear multiple times, Pelkey said it helps people develop the idea to visit the region through repetition. Breaking up the information into multiple parts, he said, also makes the content more easily digestible.
He concluded by telling business and community leaders in the audience that they can reach out to him and ACT directly via email or even Facebook message if they would like to promote an upcoming event. Looking ahead, he said ACT is going to refresh how its content is pushed online, and that part of this involves building a new website which should be going live soon.
The tourism summit also featured presentations from the Maine Snowmobile Association, Northern Maine Development Commission, MaineDOT, and ATV Maine.
