The Madison-Morgan Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) presented its annual report during an Aug. 18 Morgan County Board of Commissioners work session.
Madison-Morgan CVB Executive Director Jennifer Rosa Leon shared the presentation during the Tuesday evening session, highlighting increased interest in local tourism during fiscal year 2026. She opened by noting that tourism in the city of Madison generates an estimated $65.3 million annually.
“So, our work is really to promote Madison and Morgan County as a tourism destination and keep people wanting to come here and stay here and really support our local tourism economy, which has over 550 jobs,” Leon said. “What we do is marketing, and we’re going to go through that pay-as-you-go model with just some highlights of how we’ve done our paid, earned, social media and our owned varieties of marketing.”
The presentation covered multiple categories, including paid advertising, earned media, owned assets and social media marketing.
“We’ve really been investing more in research, in particular, to understand our visitors better and be able to target them better,” Leon said. “So, with our traditional and digital placements, we had over 7 million impressions with our more traditional advertising methods and over 176,000 impressions with our digital ads.”
According to Leon’s presentation, digital marketing campaigns saw a 200% increase in click-through rates compared with previous years. She also shared that the CVB participated in special marketing campaigns involving the FIFA World Cup and America 250.
Leon described the earned media category as the organization’s “best return on investment.” She called the category an overall success, particularly given the CVB’s smaller FY26 budget.
“This is where our money really stretches because we do have a small advertising budget, but Madison and Morgan County have so many great attractions that can call attention,” Leon said.
The CVB also recorded its best year ever in earned media, with more than 757 stories generated and 3.65 million media impressions.
“That’s almost a $1 million advertising value, which you know is much higher than our actual budget,” Leon said.
According to the presentation, the CVB’s public relations efforts generated an advertising value equivalency of $971,898, representing increases of 117% and 3% over FY2025.
Despite growth in multiple categories, Leon explained that website traffic has declined slightly, which she attributed in part to artificial intelligence tools affecting Google search results.
“My website is seeing a big dip in traffic at 23%, and a lot of other destinations that I’ve talked with are seeing very similar results,” Leon said. “My theory on it is that when you search, a lot of the keywords that we’ve gone after in our search engine optimization, like ‘best small towns, best inns in Madison,’ AI is really taking up the page.
“We’re having to scroll before you can actually get to those regular organic results and click through to Visit Madison.”
Overall, Leon said the CVB had a successful FY26 despite challenges with website traffic.
The organization welcomed 9,580 visitors during the year, while its newsletter subscriber base increased by 20%.
“Our e-newsletter has 7,500 subscribers, so it’s a really great growth, but of course with that our open rate isn’t as strong as it was previously and dropped to 18%,” Leon said. “It’s just kind of going through those growing pains in that we keep connecting to more people, but we want to make sure that they’re actually clicking and reading and learning.”