Home  The Creative Blog Spring 2008 - Busy little Bees!
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Spring 2008 - Busy little Bees! |
Welcome to the inaugural Somerset Creative Blog. What we are up to: Where we are and why we are doing it?
It's been an interesting quarter here at Somerset Creative. Firstly and very excitingly we are heralding a new form of tourism promotion partnership. A partnership between a private marketing business, namely us, and destinations. I realised something key from my involvement with ill fated tourism promotion organisations such as Visit Exmoor - Closed when the council realised it had no cash. (NB the money for tourism promotion that was allocated to Visit Exmoor and disappeared into an accounting black hole at West Somerset Council.)
What I realised was Committee's can't market tourism destinations.
The Best of Intentions for Tourism marketing
Everyone on a committee devoted to tourism promotion no doubt full of great ideas and a plan for the way forward. The problem arises in that everyone on the committee has these great ideas. Ideas that they stand by through thick and thin to promote a tourism destination. The resources get cut/ divided and shared between a lot of ideas to such an extent that in the end the committee does a lot - but none of it concentrated upon.
Sun Tzu in his military treatise the Art of War strongly advocated not dividing your troops. It is a common tenet of marketing not to divide your limited marketing war fund. This is especially important in tourism marketing and promotion. Concentrate on geographic markets, niches or verticals. Market until you conquer then move on.
Do some things incredibly well rather than lots poorly.
The Visit Minehead Marketing Parntership - A new form of Tourism Marketing
This is what we are doing with the Minehead Marketing Partnership. An innovative partnership between a private marketing organisation and a group of businesses in a destination. We are delighted to have the support of Minehead Chamber of Commerce and Trade and their chairman Graham Sizer.
We will promote Minehead through the www.visitminehead.co.uk portal. There are several key principles to the marketing program we are putting in place for this tourism destination.
- Inclusive - Potential tourism visitors want to see every attraction, tea room, restaurant, accommodation provider, attraction to get a complete idea about the destination. Imagine someone looking up a destination to only see a fraction of what it is - EG 3 restaurants rather than the complete and diverse choice of 12.
- Focused Online Marketing Program - Focusing on niche vertical market tourism portals - eg Walking, Riding, Family holiday portals.
- Tourism Advertising at the point of the Destination Decision - No matter whether someone searches by tourism experience type or accommodation type then they will get the same question presented - Where do you want to go? It is at exactly this point on these portals that we aim to answer that with "Come to Minehead"
- Public Relations - We need to focus on great public relations - providing the information that journalists and researchers need, providing press tours, releases and so much more......
Overall the Visit Minehead Marketing partnership is an exciting development in tourism promotion. Council's who we know do not have a core responsibility or duty to provide tourism marketing are not great at doing so.
One of our specialities is tourism marketing - great things are on the horizon for Visit Minehead
Other Updates
Jan - March Update - Some of what we've been up to recently...
- Visit Dunster Leaflet - Our team designed and created the new Visit Dunster tourism leaflet.
- Somerset Web Consultancy and Marketing - Exmoor Trim who manufacture replacement interior parts for Land Rovers have had a whole range of services from us including Somerset website consulting, Marketing and Product Photography.
- Launch of the www.visitminehead.co.uk program.
- Some updates to http://www.townmillsdulverton.co.uk/ Dulverton Bed and Breakfast on Exmoor. "NB Note how this link is search engine optimised - tip of the day :-) Use keywords in your inbound links......
- Somerset Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy for Tarr Farm - Luxury bed and Breakfast and Exmoor Restaurant and Royal Oak Withypool Inn - Exmoor Bed and Breakfast and PuB/Inn
- Search Engine Optimisation Marketing for Exmoor Accommodation, Devon Accommodation and Cornwall Accommodation
- We've got some great marketing projects under way with mid size enterprise in Somerset that we can't blow the whistle on just yet - But - Watch this Space!
Thank you for reading!
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