Visit California Rural Grant Program Continues to Supercharge Regional Tourism Marketing Efforts

This year, Visit California partnered with the eight California rural regional organizations to execute grant programs that will supercharge rural marketing efforts: North Coast, Shasta Cascade, Gold Country, High Sierra, Central Valley, Central Coast, Inland Empire and Deserts.

The regions received Visit California’s one-to-one matching Tourism Marketing Grants totaling $464,000 to bolster  their marketing efforts. This year regions commonly invested in the California Visitor’s and California Road Trips guides, social media marketing, website development, conference attendance and much more. 

For the third year in a row, the Rural Committee voted to execute a Google Ads retargeting program, which promotes rural destinations to consumers who have visited VisitCalifornia.com. To maximize exposure, this campaign will launch in spring, timed with Visit California’s global spring media buy.

Visit California also introduced Rural Strategic Programming funds, which allocated more than $15,000 per region for participation in the Leveraged Media Co-op. The Leveraged Media Co-op campaigns will also launch in the spring in tandem with Visit California’s global marketing investment and the Google Ads retargeting program.

The two digital campaigns, Google Ads Retargeting and Leveraged Media Co-op, will garner rural destinations almost 50 million impressions and unlimited partner hand-offs to regional websites between March and June, 2023.