Sell the Experience, Not Just the Address

I remember driving through Lanesboro years ago, it is a small town of 724 people tucked into the limestone bluffs of southeastern Minnesota. No interstate runs through it. No big-box stores anchor its corners. By most conventional measures of economic success, Lanesboro, Minnesota should have faded quietly into the prairie decades ago. Instead, it became the Bed and Breakfast Capital of Minnesota, a designation earned not by accident but by decision. Lanesboro decided to be something specific, something experiential, something imaginable. That decision changed everything.

 That is what imagination marketing does. It does not simply wave at passersby. It pulls them in. It makes people see themselves standing in your town square, tasting your food, breathing your air, and building memories they will carry home and talk about for years. Most small communities understand that they need to market themselves, but they stop at the surface. They post a flyer, run a small ad, update their website, and call it done. That is telling people you exist. Imagination marketing is entirely different. It is convincing people they belong there.

While we don’t all have a Cooperstown, consider what Cooperstown, New York accomplished with just 2,300 residents. The community could have simply announced the presence of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and waited. Instead, Cooperstown leaned into a full sensory identity. Every shop window, every restaurant menu, every street banner reinforced a single story. The result is nearly 300,000 visitors annually, tens of millions of dollars flowing through a village that would otherwise be too small to notice. The lesson is not about baseball. It is about the power of committing to one compelling story and making every corner of your community tell it.

Rural communities hold something that urban centers are desperately selling tickets to find, that is authenticity. A 2025 survey of rural challenges found that natural beauty and a genuine sense of place remain the assets rural people most consistently name when asked what makes their community worth protecting. Those are not weaknesses dressed up as strengths. They are competitive advantages waiting to be unleashed on those willing to pay a premium for genuine.

The problem is that most small communities market features when they should be marketing feelings. A features-based approach says: we have a river, a historic courthouse, and a fall festival. An imagination-based approach says: imagine kayaking at sunrise before a farm-to-table breakfast, then catching live music under the stars on a Friday night. One lists. The other transports. The difference is not budget. The difference is intention.

Think about the smells and sounds your community owns. Is there a bakery that perfumes the whole downtown block on Saturday mornings? Does your county fair still carry the squeal of a 4-H auction and the smell of kettle corn drifting across the midway? These are not quaint footnotes. They are irreplaceable assets in a world that has largely traded them for convenience. Rural tourism has been growing at a compounding rate in recent years precisely because people are hungry for exactly this.

Berea, Kentucky understood this truth. Rather than lamenting what it lacked, Berea leaned fully into its artisan heritage and became known as the Folk Arts and Crafts Capital of Kentucky, drawing visitors who come not just to buy handmade goods but to watch them being crafted, to sit with the artisan, and to carry home something human. The visitor does not simply purchase a bowl. They purchase the story of the hands that shaped it and the hills it came from.

Your community has a version of this waiting to be activated. The key is picking the authentic thread and pulling it consistently across every touch-point. Social media posts should place people inside the experience. Business windows should reinforce the theme. Events should deepen the story. Your chamber of commerce, Main Street organization, or tourism council should be the keeper of that narrative, ensuring every piece of your outreach points in the same direction.

Do not wait for an outside agency to tell you what you are. The people who grew up there already know. Sit down together and name the one thing your community does better than anywhere else. Then build everything around that truth.

Gather your local leaders, whether at a chamber, Main Street, or Betterment Club meeting or simply around a table at the local diner, and ask the question together: what is the one experience our town offers that cannot be found anywhere else? The answer is already there. The only question is whether you are willing to tell it boldly enough for the world to hear.

John Newby, Pineville, MO., is a nationally recognized publisher, community, business and media consultant, & speaker. His column appears in communities nationwide. He is currently the CEO of the McDonald County Chamber and the founder of Truly-Local, dedicated to helping communities create excitement, energy, and capture the synergies needed to thrive in an ever increasingly complicated environment. He can be reached at [email protected].