Almost all attractions, events, and destinations have what we like to call sacred cows – certain newspapers, local magazines, broadcast stations, and tons of other vendors to which they commit a certain (usually rather large) amount of their marketing budget each year.

I get it. These relationships are important. These are possibly the people that helped you when you first opened your doors. And it’s important to honor your local roots and show these businesses the same respect that you’d like for your business. By no means would I recommend cutting ties with them altogether.

However, if you aren’t adding money to your marketing budget year after year and your attendance is flat or experiencing extremely slow growth, something needs to change.

It’s a mistake we’ve seen clients make throughout the years. They just can’t let go of their sacred cows.

But if you want to grow, you can’t keep spending the majority of your media dollars in a market that knows you like the back of its hand. You have to expand and look at new opportunities. And that might mean you need to pull money away from those sacred cows. They won’t like it one bit. But it may be time for tough love.

One of our clients decided to do this, and broke their all-time record for event attendance by over 100,000 visitors. This was just with a shift in dollars, without even adding any money to the media budget.

Of course, every brand needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If it’s something you haven’t looked at yet, you should. You never know where your next dollar is going to come from. But chances are, if you’ve been in the same spot for a long time and you’ve been marketing to your local area from the very beginning, you can already count on local dollars.

It’s time to research and test new opportunities. Just tell your sacred cows that they’re awesome, you still love them, and you’ll keep them well fed, but you need to explore greener pastures. Over time, they’ll understand.