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.        

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.

Predicting visitor numbers

The nightmare for developers and promoters is a new theme park with the rides operating, the music playing but no visitors anywhere in sight; a new museum with the doors wide open but the galleries and halls empty of visitors. Imagine a newly opened restaurant, the staff all bright-eyed and eager but not one customer at the tables. Chilling visions for anyone who develops a visitor attraction or leisure venue in the belief that people will flock through the doors in numbers great enough to ensure success.

There are probably few if any cases where absolutely no one came to a new attraction, but one can think of any number where not enough people turned up and the attractions slowly faded away.An article written in 1999 by Rob Hall of Envirometrics in Australia addressed the issue of forecasting visitor numbers and it contained thought provoking comments and some useful principles for considering this knotty and difficult subject, even though written 12 years ago. It can be found here.

Carefully conducted surveys of the market,  rigorous profiling of the resident population within various drive times of the attraction,  combined with focus groups can give very useful indications of future market response. History has shown however that unless the sources of information are interpreted with skill, there is a high risk of expecting more visitors at the door than will actually arrive. It sometimes needs a strong minded consultant with a well argued case, to convince the client that he (or she) if not 'barking' then is at least being over optimistic!

Feasibility Studies for New Visitor Attractions

See a short Power Point on the key elements required in a feasibility study for new visitor attractions projects with two case studies at http://tinyurl.com/l56ocp

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/

LinkedIn Group for Visitor Attractions

A new LinkedIn networking group for all those involved in working in or for all kinds of visitor attractions has been opened on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1945560