San Benito County Chamber of Commerce President Juli Vieira gave an update on tourism efforts at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
County supervisors allocated $18,000 to the chamber in their 2016-2017 budget.
Tourism efforts included printing guides and pamphlets, filming commercials, building an online presence and magazine advertising.
The business lobby group printed 10,000 visitors guides and placed them in over 200 hotels and businesses in Santa Clara County.
The guides were also placed in places like the San Jose Airport, Monterey Airport, Oakland Airport, Casa de Fruta and Pinnacles National Park.
“We have less than 1,000 left,” Vieira said. “We hope to print between 12,000 and 15,000 this next year.”
The group worked with Dunbar Productions, a Santa Cruz-based video production company, to film two commercials highlighting county restaurants and places of interest.
Vieira said the two videos have been on YouTube since June and have reached 283 views.
The videos performed significantly better on Facebook with more than 19,000 views and 390 shares.
“The two videos produced by Dunbar Productions are also available on-demand with 1.2 million households in the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas,” Vieira said. “It’s a one-year contract that will continue to show from June to June.”
Vieira played the two videos for county supervisors, as well as a third video available on 110 public access channels across the United States.
Additionally, the chamber worked with Big Blend Online Radio for radio spots and advertised the county on nationalparktraveller.com.
A total of 44 different pages representing San Benito County received over 8.7 million views over the last year.
Vieira ended her presentation by highlighting a short-list of completed public relations projects.
“We were published in Sunset International Magazine in 12 different countries. We also did a co-op with Canada Traveller and we did target certain areas of Canada,” she said.
