Marketing is removing barriers: Lessons from a destination marketing expert

If you think balancing your content calendar and your Monday meetings is too much, imagine if you also had to factor in superstition, literal witch trials, and being a magical mecca for millions.

But it’s not all black cats and broomsticks. Today’s master oversees year-round tourism marketing for one of the US’s oldest and most history-rich towns — and also one of the largest Halloween destinations in the world.

Ashley Judge

Executive director, Destination Salem

• Fun fact: Ashley lives on the same street as the iconic Ropes Mansion (aka Allison’s house in Hocus Pocus) and gives away 1,500 pieces of candy every Halloween!
• Claim to fame: Before Destination Salem, she bootstrapped an ecommerce gift shop called Always Fits to $10m in annual sales.

Lesson 1: Nobody’s offended by “Remember us?”

As things start to look spoOoOoky in SEO and social marketing, Ashley Judge is finding scary good success with owned media.

“Which doesn’t feel sexy in 2025, but it is,” Judge says. (Note to self: Sexy Marketing Channel costume?) “Algorithms change, but emails let us tell our stories and connect to our people.”

The key, she says, is finding the right mindset. “It’s not a hard sell pitch. It’s just, ‘Hi! Remember us?’”

To illustrate her point, imagine being on the email list for a local arcade. If your inbox is constantly full of ads, you’re gonna send them straight to spam hell. But if they just send a little hello and maybe some free tokens…

“If it’s on a day when you don’t want to go to an arcade, you just won’t go to an arcade. But you’re not likely to be offended by a ‘Hi! Remember us?’ campaign.”

“And then, one day, it’s a Tuesday and you’re bored and you get an email from the arcade, so you go in. But that can’t happen if you’re not emailing them.”

To find that mindset, Judge recommends imagining you’re sending the message to a friend.

“What would the accompanying text be if I screenshot this and sent it to one of my friends? It would be very weird if they got a text from Ashley that said ‘THIS JUST IN!’ But my friends aren’t going to block me if I say ‘Wouldn’t this be fun?’”

Lesson 2: Marketing is removing barriers.

What would you do if you were expecting over 1 million visitors, but only had 3,000 parking spots available?

Personally, I’d curl into a ball and cry. But Judge had a better idea: Convince them to take the train. So she scooped up a dozen of Salem’s many colorful street performers and whipped up a campaign around riding Salem’s public transportation.

“In every facet of marketing, there’s always an opportunity to remove barriers. We’re answering business and customer service challenges.”

Photo credit: Jessica Shada

Analyzing the problems that exist along your customer journey is a great way to inspire useful marketing content and boost your metrics.

“When you have millions of eyeballs, any small barrier to conversion could be the loss of thousands of orders. A really small example: a pamphlet that’s been distributed to motor coaches for years, that was meant to be a trifold, that got uploaded as a PDF. Who wants to read an upside-down PDF?”

If you’re not sure what haunts your audience, I bet your Sales and CS teams have a clue. And you’ll be their new best friend if you ask them.

Lesson 3: Let your audience tell you who they are.

“When I worked in ecommerce, we focused on personas like ‘The Bestie,’ or ‘The Bird Lover,’ or ‘The Sweary Friend.’ These hyper-specific profiles made our marketing feel like you were talking to one person at a time.’”

Now, specific personas as a concept may not be new, but Destination Salem raises it to an artform. Faced with the challenge of a very broad audience with very diverse interests, Judge and her team needed a way to very quickly talk to many different people.

So they magicked up a ’90s Cosmo-style quiz that sorts you into personas like Cultural Connoisseur or Epicurean Explorer.

“Our biggest group, for example, is what we call ‘Muggles Seeking Magic.’ They’re not part of modern witch culture, nor are they history buffs, but they’re seeking tarot, aura photos, and spell shops.”

The quiz then offers viewers personalized suggestions and the chance to create a custom itinerary. But it also doubles as a data collection tool, which allows Judge to better understand who is visiting Salem and why.

“It’s about starting with the broadest umbrella, and then pointing them to the places that are best for them.”

And, if you’re burning with curiosity, I’m an Atlas Obscura Enthusiast.

Lingering Questions

Today’s Question

Every leader must justify marketing and brand investment with hard numbers. How do you functionally bridge the gap between creative, intangible brand value and tangible financial outcomes, and how do you justify that brand investment to key stakeholders? — Katie Miserany, Chief Communications Officer and SVP of Marketing, SurveyMonkey

Today’s Answer

Judge says: In destination marketing, our work sits between numbers and imagination. We’re here to drive economic value for residents and small businesses, so we measure everything: visitation, spending, seasonality, excise tax.

But the way we get there is by creating a bit of fantasy. People don’t visit because of data; they visit because they’ve been pulled into a story about a place. Our creative work builds that story, and when it works, you can see it in the numbers that follow.

Next Week’s Question

Judge asks: What’s something your team does purely out of love for the user — not metrics, not growth, just because it feels right?