Your Locals Are Your Tourism Strategy

Here is a scenario playing out in communities across the country: the tourism board meets, budgets get approved, brochures get printed, social media campaigns get launched — and meanwhile, locals are loading up the car on Friday afternoon to spend their weekend, and their dollars, somewhere else. The tourism strategy is aimed at the horizon while the foundation crumbles underfoot.  The sequence is backwards, and the data bears it out. Before a community can credibly invite the world in, it has to give its own residents a reason to stay.

Every dollar a resident spends at a locally owned business generates roughly 67 cents of additional local economic activity, compared to about 43 cents when spent at a chain. Thais is called the local multiplier effect, it compounds quickly. Research has found money spent at independent local businesses recirculates through the local economy two to four times more than equivalent spending at national chains. A study in Salt Lake City put it even more concretely: local restaurants recirculated 79 percent of their revenue back into the community, versus 30 percent for chain restaurants.

The point is not academic. When locals drive forty minutes to a larger city for a good dinner or a unique retail experience, that money does not come back. It is economic leakage — revenue that could have employed a neighbor, supported a local supplier, or funded a community event — gone. Multiply that pattern across thousands of households and hundreds of weekends, and a community is quietly hemorrhaging wealth it never stops to count.

Tourism is a symptom, not a cause and is worth pursuing. Tourism generates more than a trillion dollars annually in the American economy and supports over nine million jobs. When it works, it works spectacularly: Richmond, Virginia recorded a record $3.7 billion in visitor spending in a single year. Greenville, South Carolina contributed $2.3 billion to its local economy through tourism in 2023 alone. But study those success stories and a pattern emerges: the tourism did not create the vibrancy; the vibrancy created the tourism. They invested in their cores first. They built dining scenes, public spaces, arts communities, and distinct identities that made residents proud to call the place home. Visitors followed.

The classic line from Field of Dreams “If you build it, they will come” turns out to be good economic policy. Build something worth experiencing, and you will not have to beg people to show up. But communities that skip that step and go straight to the marketing campaign are, as the saying goes, putting the cart before the horse.

Community leaders often talk about winning over outside investors, outside media, and outside visitors. The audience they should be obsessing over is harder to impress and more valuable to win: the people who already live there. Residents are your harshest critics precisely because they know the truth. They know that downtown rolls up its sidewalks at six o’clock. They know which restaurants are mediocre and which storefronts have been vacant for three years. Their skepticism is not cynicism, it’s knowledge of the situation, and smart leaders learn to harness it rather than dismiss it.

When you win those critics over, something remarkable happens. Satisfied residents become the most effective marketing force a community can deploy. Word-of-mouth recommendations carry a credibility that no paid campaign can replicate. Destination marketing experts increasingly acknowledge this: satisfied locals sharing genuine enthusiasm on social media and in conversation generates the kind of trust that brochures simply cannot buy. Toronto’s tourism organization learned this directly during the pandemic, when it pivoted its entire strategy toward inspiring residents to rediscover their own city. The response was immediate and enthusiastic — because they finally gave locals something to be enthusiastic about.

The pattern of communities spending heavily on tourism before they are ready is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of sequencing. Tax dollars flow toward tourism boards and marketing campaigns while the downtown sits on hospice. The community brands itself as something it is not yet prepared to be — and visitors who show up and find the gap between promise and reality are unlikely to come back or recommend the place to friends.

The right sequence looks like this: invest in the core first. Create an environment with quality restaurants, unique retail, compelling events, and inviting public spaces — the things locals have been driving elsewhere to find. When residents start spending their weekends at home instead of elsewhere, several things happen simultaneously: economic leakage stops, local businesses grow stronger, the local multiplier starts compounding, and the community starts generating the kind of authentic energy that outsiders can feel when they visit.

Events are a partial exception to the sequencing rule. Building a calendar of local events — festivals, markets, concerts, races — is worth doing at any stage of a community’s development. Events create energy, give residents reasons to gather, and generate exactly the kind of organic social media content that reaches potential visitors. They are one of the few tools that serve both local vitality and tourism promotion simultaneously, which makes them a smart early investment regardless of where a community is on its transformation journey.

Balance is key, none of this is an argument against tourism. A well-functioning tourism economy funnels outside dollars into local businesses, creates jobs, diversifies the tax base, and strengthens community pride. Those are real and significant benefits. The argument is about order of operations.

Build the core. Create the heart and soul. Earn the loyalty of the people who live there. When that happens, the community’s marketing becomes authentic rather than aspirational, and every satisfied resident becomes a credible ambassador carrying the message further than any paid campaign could reach. At that point, tourism does not just follow — it grows beyond what any committee meeting ever dared to project.  The visitors will come. But first, give the locals a reason to stay.

John Newby, Pineville, MO., is a nationally recognized publisher, community, business and media consultant, & speaker. His column appear in communities nationwide. He is currently the CEO of the McDonald County Chamber and the founder of Truly-Local, dedicated to helping communities create excitement, energy, and capture the synergies needed to thrive in an ever increasingly complicated environment. He can be reached at John@Truly-Local.org.