One data point in the State of Destination Marketing 2026 report captures a shift destination marketers can’t afford to ignore.
In 2025, 59% of DMOs globally said top-of-funnel awareness was their primary campaign focus. In 2026, that number dropped to 25%.
That's not a gradual shift. That's a collapse. While the reasons behind it are understandable—tightening budgets, rising stakeholder pressure, a performance-first mandate—the long-term consequences are worth examining before more destinations follow the same path.
The pressure DMOs are operating under right now is real. Stakeholders across every region want proof that marketing is driving economic outcomes, not just reach. Globally, 72% of DMOs say ROI and economic impact are their top reporting priorities. In North America, that climbs to 79%. In the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, 83% of DMOs say conversion is the most important metric.
In that environment, awareness campaigns are a hard sell. They take longer to tie to revenue. They're harder to attribute. So when budgets tighten, awareness is often the first thing cut.
The result is a media mix that skews heavily toward mid- and lower-funnel activity. In North America, 31% of DMOs now say conversions are their primary goal, up from 15% in 2025. That's a significant shift in a single year.
Performance marketing works, but only on travelers who already know your destination exists.
The visitors you're retargeting, converting, and attributing got into your funnel somehow. They saw an ad. They read a travel feature. Someone recommended your destination. Something built an initial impression that made them consider you at all. Over time, pull that awareness investment out of the mix, and the conversion pool shrinks—quietly, and with a delay that makes it hard to trace back to the root cause.
This is the structural risk of treating brand and performance as competing priorities in destination marketing. Based on the 2026 data, a growing share of the industry is drifting in that direction.
The irony is that the very stakeholder pressure driving DMOs toward performance is what makes brand investment harder to defend, even though brand investment is one of the many ways to make sustained performance possible.
Our report makes clear that the DMOs performing best aren't choosing between brand and performance. They're running both.
Nearly half of DMOs globally (47%) are already running full-funnel campaigns that guide travelers from awareness through to booking. In Europe, 46% operate this way. In markets across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, 56% are investing in full-funnel strategies.
49% of DMOs say tracking and attribution is their top barrier to managing full-funnel campaigns, up from 37% in 2025. When you can't cleanly show how an awareness touchpoint connects to a downstream booking, it becomes easy to cut. When it gets cut, you lose the engine that powers future conversion.
Budget allocation across the funnel is also increasingly difficult, cited as a challenge by 36% of DMOs in 2026, up from just 15% the year before. Teams are wrestling with how to justify spending at the top of the funnel when stakeholders are focused on what's happening at the bottom.
DMOs getting this right aren't waiting for attribution technology to catch up. They're finding ways to make brand investment more measurable and more defensible, right now.
The most effective content in 2026 serves double duty: it builds emotional connection early and is optimized to surface when travelers are actively planning. 76% of DMOs are investing in short-form video. 72% are creating articles that match search intent. 71% are building local stories and blogs that bring a destination to life.
Done well, this content earns awareness and drives consideration simultaneously. It doesn't require choosing a funnel stage. It works across all of them.
As generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews change how travelers discover destinations, being surfaced in those responses is a meaningful form of top-of-funnel presence. 51% of DMOs are either very concerned about this shift or already developing a strategy in response.
The DMOs getting ahead of it are structuring their content to be authoritative, question-answering, and easy for AI systems to find and cite. That's not just a technical SEO tactic. It's a brand play. If a traveler's first exposure to your destination is an AI-generated answer to "best places to visit in the Pacific Northwest," you need to be in it. Getting there requires the same investment in authoritative content that traditional brand awareness has always required.
65% of DMOs are now running always-on destination marketing campaigns, up from 51% in 2025. When built correctly, always-on isn't a lower-funnel tactic. It's a way to stay present across the full planning cycle. The key is structuring the campaign to reach travelers at the inspiration stage and stay visible through to booking, rather than defaulting to retargeting because it's easier to report.
If your media mix has shifted heavily toward performance over the last 12 months, one question is worth asking internally: where are the travelers in your current conversion funnel actually coming from?
If the honest answer is "we're not entirely sure," that's worth paying attention to.
The pipeline you're converting today was largely built by the awareness investment made in prior years. If that investment has been reduced, the impact may not be visible immediately, but it will show up eventually, in a softer pipeline and harder-to-explain conversion declines.
That's not an argument against performance marketing or economic accountability. Stakeholders are right to want proof of impact, and the tools to demonstrate it are better than they've ever been. But the strongest DMO marketing strategies in this year's research aren't choosing between brand and performance. They're running both, with content built for AI visibility, always-on campaigns that span the full funnel, and a clear story for stakeholders about why awareness investment today protects the conversion results they'll be asking about tomorrow.
The destinations that figure out how to make that case—with data, clearly, and proactively—will be the ones that aren't scrambling to rebuild their pipeline two or three years from now.
Want the complete picture? Download the State of Destination Marketing 2026 for regional breakdowns, channel data, and case studies from leading DMOs around the world. Or talk to a Sojern expert about building a full-funnel strategy that proves impact at every stage.
A full-funnel DMO marketing strategy guides travelers from first exposure to a destination all the way through to a booking, rather than focusing only on conversion. It combines awareness-stage investment—brand campaigns, short-form video, editorial content—with mid- and lower-funnel performance activity. Nearly half of DMOs globally (47%) are already operating this way, with adoption even higher in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa at 56%. The goal is to stay present across the entire planning cycle, not just reach travelers after they've already decided to search.
DMOs are under real pressure to show ROI: 72% globally say economic impact is their top reporting priority, and in North America that climbs to 79%. Awareness campaigns are harder to attribute, so they're often the first cut when budgets tighten — and between 2025 and 2026, the share of DMOs prioritizing top-of-funnel awareness dropped from 59% to 25% in a single year. The structural risk is that performance marketing only works on travelers who already know your destination exists. Pull awareness out of the mix, and the conversion pool shrinks quietly, with enough of a delay that the cause is easy to miss until the pipeline is already soft.
The strongest approach is content that works across the full funnel at once—76% of DMOs are investing in short-form video and 72% are creating articles matched to search intent, both of which build awareness and drive consideration simultaneously. AI search visibility is becoming a measurable brand channel in its own right: being surfaced in ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews when a traveler asks "best places to visit in X" is top-of-funnel presence with a clear connection to downstream intent. Always-on campaigns structured to reach travelers at the inspiration stage—not just retarget existing visitors—give stakeholders a visible, reportable alternative to cutting awareness entirely.
Por que dados comportamentais e intenção em tempo real estão substituindo a demografia no marketing de viagens.
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Descubra como os profissionais de marketing de destino estão se adaptando em 2026.
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