Frequently
Asked Questions
Content & Storytelling
How can Great Lakes Studios help showcase our destination?
Our professional videographers and designers create art-directed photos and videos for all your promotional and social media needs. We handle everything from scripting and storyboarding to scheduling and final edits.
Can you help us tell our unique brand story?
Yes. Our award-winning storytellers create inspiring content for websites, blogs, custom publications, and SEO/AEO optimization to make your brand stand out.
Do you partner with organizations to produce custom publications?
Absolutely. We handle publication design from concept to delivery, tailoring content to your target audience. We partner with destination marketing groups and trade associations.
Photo & Video Production
What types of organizations do you work with for photo and video production?
We work primarily with destination marketing organizations, visitor bureaus, cultural attractions, restaurants, hotels, chambers of commerce and regional tourism associations. Our team tailors production scope and style to fit your audience, budget and promotional goals.
What does your photo and video production process look like from start to finish?
Every project begins with a discovery conversation to understand your location, audience and campaign objectives. From there, our team handles creative development — scripting, shot lists and scheduling — through to on-location production and post-production editing. You'll receive review rounds before any final assets are delivered, ensuring the content reflects your brand accurately.
Can photo and video assets be produced to work across multiple channels?
Yes. We produce content with multi-platform distribution in mind, creating assets optimized for your website, social media, email campaigns, digital advertising and print collateral. Whenever possible, a single production engagement yields a library of assets in appropriate formats for each channel.
How do we get started if we're interested in a visitor guide or custom publication?
Reach out through our contact form and tell us a bit about your organization and what you're hoping to accomplish. A member of our team will follow up to learn more about your audience, distribution goals and timeline. From there we'll walk you through our publication process and put together a proposal tailored to your project.
Digital Marketing & Web Development
What is programmatic advertising and how does it benefit marketers?
Programmatic advertising uses data and automation to deliver your ads to the right audience at the right time across display, video, streaming TV, audio and email channels. This means your budget is working smarter — reaching in-market travelers and potential visitors based on behavior, geography and intent rather than broad demographic guesses.
What is geo-fencing and how does it work?
Geo-fencing lets us draw a virtual boundary around a specific location — a competitor attraction, a convention center, a highway rest stop — and deliver targeted ads directly to mobile devices within that area. It's a powerful tool for destination marketing, letting you reach visitors while they're actively traveling or making plans nearby.
Can you target ads to specific households with streaming TV?
Yes. Our Addressable Streaming TV service delivers ads to specific households wherever they're watching — on smart TVs, connected devices and streaming platforms. Combined with our programmatic display and pre-roll video capabilities, it lets you build a coordinated campaign that follows your target audience across screens.
How do you manage and report on our campaigns?
We offer paid search, paid social and programmatic channels as standalone services or as part of an integrated strategy — coordinated across Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and programmatic platforms with consistent creative and unified reporting. Every month we share a clear breakdown of performance: impressions, clicks, conversions and the KPIs that matter to your goals. We treat reporting as a conversation, not a data dump.
Do you build custom websites, or work with templates?
We develop fully custom websites built for performance, not template-adapted retrofits. Our web development team works closely with your brand guidelines and user experience goals to create a site that loads fast, ranks well and converts visitors into guests or customers.
Can you help with SEO and AEO as part of a website build, or as a standalone service?
Both. SEO is baked into every website we develop — site structure, page speed, metadata and content architecture are all considered from the start. We also offer standalone SEO strategy and audits, local SEO and organic SEO for organizations that want to improve an existing site's search visibility.