A presentation by Andrew Bateman, Tourism Manager and Kirstin Monk, Tourism Officer at Hampshire County Council’s Economic Development Office. The presentation looks at the importance of tourism to Hampshire, how best to meet the needs of visitors and provides a quick overview of the types of destination marketing activity taking place across Hampshire. The presentation was one of several presentation made at a one day workshop that looked at the issue of museums and tourism. The event, called Working Together, took place at the Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth on 8th November 2011 and was organised by The Tourism Company and SAM Ltd. The workshop is part of a broader campaign, funded by Renaissance, to help museums in Hampshire and the Solent to work together to promote themselves to tourists.
4. The Hampshire destination brands North Wessex Downs Hampshire Winchester Test Valley South Downs New Forest Southampton Portsmouth The Solent Hayling Island
We’ll be talking you through how important tourism is to Hampshire, how best to meet the needs of visitors and give you a quick overview of the types of destination marketing activity taking place across the county.
AB notes
Museums are an integral part of the cultural offer in Hampshire, and are therefore a key part of the tourism offer too.
Hampshire is one of the UK’s largest and most diverse counties. Unlike destinations like Cornwall it doesn’t have a single destination brand identity. Instead it’s made up of a patchwork of large and smaller destination brands.
So how can you look at attracting more visitors to your museum? ‘Push’ marketing is the old school way of marketing when you take your product to the customer and hope they will make a purchase or in this case make a visit. This form of marketing has its limitations and works best if your museum is already known to the people you are speaking to, either by reputation or through a previous visit. It isn’t our recommended approach for raising your profile and attracting tourists to your museum…
Today destination marketing is more about engaging with potential visitors, creating interest via word of mouth and helping to make life easy for busy people by providing itineraries and packages so they don’t have to think for themselves. Unless there is a museum or collection of national or international importance, it would be very unlikely for a short break or holiday to be organised around a particular museum. Instead we should ask how can the museum offer be effectively integrated into the wider destination offer?
If you’re starting to look at how you can attract more visitors to your museum, let’s start with how you perceive your museum. Close your eyes for a moment and think about your museum, picture yourself there. What’s the first thing you think of? How are you currently promoting your museum? Does your marketing reflect what your museum means to YOU, or are you putting yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor?
There are myriad reasons why someone will book a short break to a destination. They may be tying it in with a visit to a friend of member of their family. There may be a special event going on, or a large attractions they wish to visit. But regardless of their drivers, it’s the overall experience they are looking for. How does your marketing reflect this at present?
The outline tourism marketing strategy written by David and Pam which helped direct this current Renaissance campaign included some very interesting findings around the reasons people visit museums from Visit Britain and Renaissance North East. It implies that quite a change is needed away from the traditional way of marketing museums, focussing on their events programme and collections.
We use a range of strong tourism themes to help promote Hampshire. These themes are made stronger by integrating complementary product to promote a rich package to the customer. For example, we are running a food and drink campaign next year called ‘Good Food Hampshire’. It’s an opportunity to get involved and benefit from some free publicity, which you could do by providing quirky food-related stories for our PR team, for example. If you’d like more information, please see Kirstin in the break or at lunchtime.
We’re unable to access the internet so can’t give you a demonstration of what thematic marketing looks like on our website, but perhaps take a look when you’re back in the office and see how we group tourism product together. Packaging of tourism product can be made much easier using the web. If you click on a museum database record for example, you’ll not only be able to find out about their opening hours and location and scroll through their images, you’ll also be able to see what the nearest eateries are, where the nearest hotels are located and then you can create your own travel itinerary and email it to yourself.
There are also various ways you can work with your local tourism officer or tourism team to help raise your profile with potential visitors to your local area. Not all destinations offer these opportunities, some destinations are better resourced than others. If you are based in the New Forest, Winchester or East Hampshire, things are a little clearer for you as there are two membership organisations for tourism businesses that you can choose to join. Winchester DMO new for 2012 Our message is that collaborative working in tourism is much more effective than trying to gain visitors on your own – a critical mass of product is more appealing to the visitor.
Here are some examples of the types of destination marketing opportunities available via the web, at local and county level….
…plus some of the other opportunities available off line. The importance of networking with other tourism organisations cannot be underestimated; it’s an excellent way of keeping in the loop, finding out what’s going on and can lead to collaborative working, for example joint promotion between businesses in the local vicinity.
Here are a few questions to leave you with around how you can integrate your museum offer. Forget silo working, this is all about working collaboratively to create a richer visitor experience.