Visit Kent
Basecamp to Exploration
Kent, Washington doesn’t top most Pacific Northwest travel lists — and that’s exactly the opportunity. An affordable, accessible city with serious cultural credentials and a prime location between Seattle, the mountains and the coast, Kent had everything a traveler needs to explore the region. It just needed a strategy that said so. As Visit Kent’s Marketing Agency of Record, JayRay set out to change the conversation about Kent.
Guiding Thought
Why compete with Seattle when you can be the smarter way to experience everything Seattle is near? Kent’s greatest asset wasn’t any single attraction. It was its position as a convenient, well-priced hub for travelers with bigger regional ambitions.
Basecamp, Built Out
We redesigned VisitKent.com from the ground up, using years of Google Analytics data to guide homepage priorities and user experience improvements. The site highlights Kent’s outdoor recreation, cultural diversity, hotels, parks, sports and dining, with improved navigation, a packed events calendar and updated content spotlighting hotel packages and the Kent Food Trails. We integrated a search function, a dynamic social feed and TripAdvisor’s API to serve live hotel listings and reviews directly on the site.
Beyond the website, we developed the “basecamp” brand platform and brought it to life across channels: custom blogs, social media content and influencer itineraries.
Data-Driven, Destination-Focused
With the brand foundation in place, we built the audience strategy around real traveler behavior. Geolocation data revealed who was visiting Kent, where they came from and what they did while they were there, intelligence we used to reach both past visitors and look-alike audiences in key drive- and fly-markets across the West. Animated digital ads drove traffic to the landing page, while a parallel Expedia and Hotels.com campaign put Kent’s hotel packages directly in front of travelers already in booking mode.
Media relations ran alongside the paid work, with quarterly story pitches, repurposed blog content and hosted press visits — including a cultural food tour that sent three writers home with months’ worth of story material.
Results: Kent on the Map
