Developing a Marketing Strategy and Marketing Plan

Every visitor attraction and tourism destination is different whether it's a museum, heritage railway, theme park, historic garden or stately home, countryside footpath, church trail,  battlefield etc and they all have issues unique to them. However certain generic marketing and business issues face all attraction owners and operators and the article available in the following link describes an approach to creating a robust marketing strategy and plan based on a real life (but anonymous!) example. Click here to download.        

Tourism week

This week, via social media, the Government is highlighting the significant contribution that tourism makes to the UK economy. Please help raise awareness by promoting any tourism job opportunities you have, and sharing any case studies of your staff, including what they do, why they chose a career in tourism, and why they would recommend it. Remember to use #getbritainworking. Please also re-tweet @DWPgovuk and @DCMS.

Mobile messaging and the tourist industry



Hiker receiving a text

According to research commissioned by Text Local, one of the UK's leading mobile messaging companies, almost 1,000,000 mobile phone users across the UK want to hear from a travel company once a month.  

Opportunity: There are 4.74 million mobile users across the UK that would welcome communications from travel companies. By 2015, that number will increase to 5.2 million.

The number of opt-ins on a smartphone will increase from 2.7 million to 4 million over the same timeframe.

CRM key stats: Males account for 58.1%of opt-ins. In total. 1.71million opt-ins in the UK would want to hear from a travel company more than once a month. The demographic most likely to opt-in is the 35-44 year olds. 

Around the UK: The south of England (West Country, Meridian and London) will account for 1.59 million opt-ins. Of these opt-ins, 948,119 would want to hear from travel companies once a month or more.

 

Text Local say that the travel and tourism industry is seeing a huge increase in profitability through mobile messaging, due to its powerful viral capabilities. Ticket sales often come from friends and family who have been forwarded an SMS text. Sending e-tickets mobile vouchers and coupons via text – all with bar codes for data capture -  ‘is a perfect medium for this sector removing the need for expensive printing and postage.’

 

Attractions, tour operators and travel agents can then build up an ever growing database from customers opting-in to receive offers and information, 'there’s no better channel to get the message across than mobile.' And it can be used for research, sending web links etc

Heritage tourism boosts UK economy

Broadway Tower - Cotswolds

Heritage-based tourism is now worth £26.4bn to the UK economy - £5.8bn higher than the previous estimate published in 2010 according to new research released by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

 

The new report by Oxford Economics also suggests that heritage is playing an increasingly important part in the choices of Britons who decide to stay in the UK for their holiday – over a quarter of all UK holiday activities undertaken by UK residents now involve heritage -  the ‘heritage staycation’

 

HLF published its first report on heritage tourism, Investing in Success, by Oxford Economics, in 2010, based on data from 2007. The report analysed the impact of the heritage-based visitor economy and established that the sector made an even bigger contribution to UK GDP than the advertising, car manufacturing or film industries. Those findings clearly highlighted the importance of heritage tourism and its ability to help the UK economy.

 

The new report drawing on the latest visitor statistics from 2011, demonstrates the power of heritage in attracting visitors even more clearly.

 

The higher figure of £26.4bn is explained by a number of factors:

• An overall increase in visits: Between 2007 and 2011 there was a rise of 13% in both international visits to the UK for holidays and the number of overnight holiday stays in the UK made by UK residents. Domestic day trips (over the longer period 2005-11) rose by 47%
• People were spending more on these trips: International visitors on holiday were spending 28% more per visit in 2011 than in 2007, and UK residents on holiday were spending 7% more
• Heritage has become more important in people’s holiday choices.

The most recent survey data provides a more accurate picture of what activities people undertake whilst on holiday.

 

For UK residents on holiday in the UK, 28% of the total activities they undertook were to a heritage site or attraction. Previous survey work put this question in a slightly different way, by asking what activities people planned to undertake, so the latest research gives us a better indication of the importance of heritage

 

The report is available here  - Economic impact of the UK heritage tourism economy 2013 (PDF, 955KB)(opens in new window) by Kareen El Beyroutyand Andrew Tessler - Oxford Economics

 

Two kinds of heritage - Bulleid Pacific and new Morgan
Three Wheeler at the Severn Valley Railway

 

Could new research change holiday habits?

Writing in the tourism trade magazine Destination UK, Christina Eccles says it has been claimed groundbreaking research taking place at Manchester Metropolitan University could change the way tourists behave on holiday forever.

Senior lecturer in eTourism Dr Timothy Jung is currently working on a pilot scheme in Dublin that would allow visitors to scan buildings and receive real-time information in the form of text, pictures, animation or video. Known as Augmented Reality Tourism, the technology offers richer information updated minute-by-minute beyond the smartphone apps currently available.

 

Streetmuseum

For example the Museum of London's StreetMuseum is a free augmented reality iPhone app that allows the user to browse historical photographs in various parts of the city.The app leads one to various locations around London using either the map or GPS. Once there, clicking the “3D View” button, the app will recognize the location and overlay the historical photograph over the live video feed of the real world, giving a brief glimpse into how the past looked. See examples at  Streetmuseum view

Working with Loma Maxwell of the Economic Development Unit at Dublin City Council and Alex Gibson of the Dublin Institute of Technology, Dr Jung is testing the technology on buildings including hotels, restaurants and cinemas on Dublin’s O'Connell Street. They will be looking at using different levels of media, one will be text only, another will use photography and the third will use video or animation.

Their view is that the technology will change the way tourists experience cities,  encouraging visitors to spend more and contribute further to the tourism income of the city they are visiting. Dr Jung says the idea could spread across the globe and be really groundbreaking.

Developments in Augmented Reality Tourism could also provide a host of new real time marketing opportunities for businesses - such as local advertising to tourists

How do you think developments in technology could boost tourism in the UK?

 

Would you like to see this idea take off in our towns and cities?

 

Send your comments to the Destination UK editorial team by emailing ce@scriptmedia.co.uk. and they will print the best comments in the next issue of the magazine.

 

Or comment on this blog

Thanks to Destination UK and the Museum of London

 

New museum for London

Artist's impression the new Postal Museum in London

A new visitor attraction and museum for London has taken a step forward with the announcement that The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA) has received planning approval from the London Borough of Camden for its new home at Calthorpe House, near Mount Pleasant sorting office.

The new Postal Museum will provide access to the BPMA’s collections of 400 years of postal, social and design history, including photographs, posters, vehicles, pillar boxes, employment records of millions of people and a world-class stamp collection.

The BPMA will be able to exhibit objects from its museum collection, which is currently held in storage. The new state-of-the-art premises will also include educational facilities for visiting schools, digitisation facilities and a purpose built Archive repository, built to modern environmental and security standards.

Who do I trust?

Just who can I rely on for travel information?

One of the most vexing challenges for the marketers of travel services is that of addressing a fundamental dilemma in contemporary marketing practice: it has become more difficult to influence prospective customers as it has become easier to reach them, says Peter Yesawich, head of the Ypartnership. Personal recommendations have the most credibility while social media have the least, a new analysis reports.

“The question of source credibility is therefore one of great interest to marketers of travel services, particularly as it relates to the degree of influence consumers ascribe to the kaleidoscope of information now available on destinations and/or specific travel service suppliers,” Yesawich says. “And given the explosive growth in the number of sources from which consumers can now sample commentary, it’s important to understand they ascribe far greater confidence to the information they receive from some sources than others.”

This “Credibility Continuum,” as measured in the Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2010 Portrait Of American Travelers, stretches from the personal testimonials of friends and family members (the most credible) to the content found on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (the least credible).

 Source

Book Review - Aviation and Tourism: Implications for Leisure Travel

copyright Dan Zelazo

Current interest in Boris Johnson's (and Lord Foster's) ideas for a new London airport prompted me to dig out my review of Aviation and Tourism: Implications for Leisure Travel.

Reading this densely packed compilation of studies of the relation between aviation and tourism, I pondered on the intended readership. The editors say that they '...continue to be surprised at the failure of academia, government, industry and other stakeholders to fully recognise and appreciate the close and complex relationships which exist between aviation and tourism, particularly when leisure travel is concerned.' This motivated them to get '26 distinguished experts ' to contribute.

All those stakeholders have plenty on their desks to contemplate; ranging from the third runway at Heathrow, the future economics of the airline sector, and energy prices, while the tourism industry itself is under severe pressure and all this within the scenario of the cliché of the credit crunch - help!

Trying to read this book in one go is not for the faint hearted. There is a great deal of detail and the sheer scale of the attempted reach of the book is slightly intimidating. My own review copy is annotated with pencilled remarks and has a liberal profusion of 'post it notes' for future reference. So who is the book for? It provides a useful single source for those wanting either an overall view or others needing the detail of aspects of a particular theme.

The book is well structured starting with a brief over view and followed by seven parts covering leisure travel demand, regulation, airline issues, the implications for airports, economic and environmental impacts and some destination case studies followed by a round up of conclusions, themes and future issues. Separate papers within each section look at aspects of the main theme.

So, this book is perhaps essential reading for both students and for those who have difficult decisions to make on the future strategy of the aviation and tourism sector.

Review written by Nick Booker, Attract Marketing director and originally published in the Tourism Society's quarterly Journal

Aviation and Tourism: Implications for Leisure Travel

Credit(s): Anne Graham, Andreas Papatheodorou and Peter Forsyth

Publisher's name, year of publication: Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2008

ISBN: 978-0-7546-7189-9

Number of pages: 377

Researching, Developing and Marketing Tourism Products

Speakers from Attract can offer the following content for conferences workshops, seminars and academic courses - all tailored to fit the audience

 

1. Tourism - Destination Marketing

 Marketing is one of the core functions of a destination manager. The module provides advice on adopting a strategic approach from the outset i.e. defining the product, market planning and targeting, identifying the right media and implementing campaigns.

 

• A strategic approach to Destination Marketing
• The product or what to take to market, including branding
• Who to target
• Routes to market – or how to reach the visitor
• Marketing to business tourism organisations
• Selecting the media mix
• Case study

 2. Visitor attractions

This module looks at what constitutes an attraction, examines the general principles of developing an attraction, the focus of different kinds of attraction and in particular looks at attractions in the cultural and heritage tourism sector

 

• Defining Cultural and Heritage tourism
• Basic concepts - setting the scene
• Feasibility studies and business planning
• Audience Development Planning
• Interpretation - developing themes and storylines
• Access for all - physical and intellectual
• Operational issues in visitor attractions
• Case study - based on a visit to a local attraction and a workshop

3. Using market research techniques to help make the right decisions

This module looks at gathering and using data on which to make the right strategic decisions and how to use market research to monitor and evaluate performance.

 

• Key elements of a successful research project
• Developing the objectives of the research project
• Primary and secondary research - differences and when to use
• Quantitative and qualitative research – differences and when to use
• Other techniques’ e.g. online, desk research, diaries, workshops, csultation
• Ad hoc and on-going/continuous research
• Evaluation of marketing activity
• Planning and developing a brief
• Case study

 

Somewhere worth leaving home for





Tourism is a key sector of the economy and for private and public sector operators, developers and investors it offers both opportunities and challenges.

New developments require careful market research and considered strategic planning. The viability of new leisure and tourism projects must be rigorously tested and there has to be a detailed appreciation of market conditions and of the planning and development contexts for all development. The constant theme that characterises the sector is the need to attract customers, maximise repeat visits and purchases and maintain or improve competitive positions.

Unfortunately, strategic planning for visitor attractions often has rather disjointed beginnings and issues of “secondary” importance, such as access, buildings, design and detailed planning frequently dominate discussion. However, the fundamental questions to be addressed are: “How will this visitor attraction work as a consumer proposition?” and “How can it be branded for success?”

Creating a visitor attraction that is sufficiently strong, differentiated and marketable is, in the long term, even more important than the key “front-end” questions of funding, investors and capital needs. It is not investors and public funding authorities who sustain a profitable operation but consumers. The return on investment depends ultimately not on buildings, but on individuals, seeking a visitor attraction experience.

A visitor attraction can be defined as “somewhere worth leaving home for”, and this is as relevant to a single museum or cathedral as it is to a tourist area or town. People make visitor attractions – the people who conceive them, the people who develop them, the people who manage them, but above all the people who visit.

In a successful attraction, the product on offer is the experience itself. Committing time to that experience must be rewarding for the individual; spending money on that experience must be worthwhile. In the experience economy, visitor attractions must constantly "reinvent" themselves to encourage repeat visits and survive. This economy of experience is about quality, service and choice – it is not about size. The successful product is about expectations, experiences and memories for individual consumers.

Ultimately, it is people that make visitor attractions successful, not buildings and infrastructure. Visitor attraction developers, owners and managers must always hold the consumer proposition and the visitor attraction brand firmly in mind when undertaking strategic planning.

Networking for Visitor Attractions - Group on LinkedIn

Visitor attractions have many common themes. problems and opportunities whether they are large or small, museums, theme parks, castles or heritage centres. The Visitor Attractions Group is a group for operators and suppliers of goods and services to share ideas, experiences and advice - joining as a LinkedIn member lets you share in discussions, networking and job opportunities.

Developing church trails - some notes and initial ideas

Church Trails

Background

Britain is home to a wealth of ecclesiastical buildings rich in history and full of beauty and trails can help vistors and tourists to discover and explore some of the exciting and fascinating parish churches in rural areas.

Raising the profile of churches and chapels in rural areas benefits the economy of the villages in which they are located whilst helping those buildings to become more sustainable.

Church Tourism Programmes offer tourists and visitors the opportunity to travel between churches and to learn about and enjoy their history, culture and heritage.

A variety of trails of different length and demand is recommended so that visitors can plan a route suitable for the fit and active, children and the less active.

Cycle trails should be planned to avoid conflict between cyclists and walkers and cycle security points should be provided, in addition to car parking where practical.

Trails particularly accessible (but not exclusive) for those with special needs should be provided and highlighted although access for all wherever possible is a priority

The following represents a few examples of how to approach the development of a church trail but is not intended to be an exhaustive list.

In order to improve engagement and inclusivity interpretation should place the churches, their architecture, artefacts, memorials etc into their historical and cultural context – crossing cultures, crossing time etc.

Rural Church Trail Website

A website can provide information on the trail themes and stories, locations and routs and downloadable resources. Access to resources such as children's trail leaflets, interpretative maps and events programmes can also be made available

Church based circular walks and heritage trails

Walking activities can be developed themed for different audiences including children and families, curious minds based trails, nature trails and churchyard explorers.

Walking and Cycling trails

Short and long routes can link two or more churches using footpaths and cycle routes. Each trail would be designed to be walked either way and include links to public transport, pubs and restaurants and sites of interest.

Volunteer guided tours of participating churches and churchyards

Churches can offer guided tours at set times led by volunteers during weekend, holiday periods or linked to events.

Events

Themed events linking participating churches such as art festivals, family activities, The Big Draw, religious festivals and saints' days.

Architecture and the built environment

Trails linked to architecture and building conservation. Conservation in action and archaeology projects that can be observed or participated in at participating churches.

God's Acre

Activities linked to exploring churchyards including nature trails, ecological surveys, famous monuments or grave stone inscription trails linked to local and national history and culture

Listening posts

Listening posts at strategic locations providing real authentic voices of local people telling their stories about the social and cultural importance of the church.

Rubbing plaques

Rubbing plaques at each church and a recording booklet. Collect a rubbing from each church to complete a full set.

Concluding comments

There are many other possible developments within a trail project that can provide activity and interest for the visitor which could include geo-caching, storytelling sessions, coach tours and photographic and art competitions. Particularly, special photo and painting viewpoints may be featured throughout the project.

Other aspects and activities that should be taken into account include:

• Social networking for promoting trails and sites eg Flickr, Facebook etc
• Smart Phone technology – e.g. mobile downloads/apps
• GPS walking technology
• Maps
• View points/Points of interest /Photo opportunities
• Picnic spots
• Waymarkers
• Timed trails

The aim should be to provide an exciting experience which enhances and enriches the visitor experience.

For more information on developing church trails and indeed trails for other buildings with themes please send an email to info@attractmarketing.co.uk with 'Trails' in the subject line

Recent projects and visits

Most of our projects are very visual so we take photographs. For some recent and current projects and also some visits to places we have some views and comments on see http://www.flickr.com/photos/attract_marketing_tourism_and_attraction_consultancy/

Tips, tricks and hints on fundraising

For professional tips and tricks of fundraising for festivals, tourism and heritage projects and museums see the presentation from Nick Booker of Attract Marketing Ltd and Bridget Rennie, Development Manager of City of London Festival showcased at the highly successful Tourism Management Institute Hot Topic Event 2009 Conference in Birmingham in May 2009. See it on the articles section of http://www.attractmarketing.co.uk

Tourism Workshops and Seminars

Attract Marketing offer a range of workshops and seminars tailored to the potential audience and based around the subject of the Development and Marketing of Heritage Tourism Products

The range of workshops/seminars include the following topics:
What is Heritage Tourism?Topic 1: Basic Concepts - Setting the Scene
Topic 2: Audience Development – what is it and who will come?
Topic 3: Interpretation - developing themes and story lines
Topic 4: Access for all - physical and intellectual
Best Practice in Heritage TourismTopic 5: Collections & Conservation Management Plans
Topic 6: Heritage Learning
Topic 7: Feasibility Studies - key elements
Topic 8: Applying the theory - Case Studies
Visitor IssuesTopic 1: Creating an Audience Development Plan
Topic 2: Operating the Heritage Attraction
Topic 3: Creating a Learning and Access Plan
Topic 4: The Marketing Campaign Plan
Case Study based on a visit to a local attraction - Making it betterTopic 5: Analysing the problem - Writing the brief
Topic 6: Developing a new offer
Topic 7: Making it work
Topic 8: Launching the revamped attraction

The clients for this series include a European Union funded workshop for the Estonian Tourist Board where we worked with a local consultant Oliver Loode of Consumetric.
Download the introductory presentation from http://www.attractmarketing.co.uk/Heritage_Tourism_Basic_Concepts_Topic1.pdf for more information.