Tourism Marketing Support for London Boroughs
Encouraging more visitors to London to venture beyond the traditional tourist ‘haunts’ and explore more parts of the City has been a key part of the Mayor of London’s ‘Vision for Tourism’. Behind the plan lies a desire to see all areas of London benefitting from the revenue and job creation that tourism can generate. In order to help make this a reality, London’s destination marketing body Visit London and London Councils have developed a series of inititiaves designed to support London boroughs in improving their tourism marketing performance. Over the past couple of years, we have been commissioned to deliver three of these inititaives.
London for Londoners, A Marketing Toolkit: Our first involvement came in 2005 when we produced London for Londoners, A Marketing Toolkit. This sought to provide tips on how to promote London boroughs to local visitors – i.e. residents and those in neighbouring boroughs, workers and VFR markets.
One-to-one marketing consultancies: The following year, we were commissioned to provide a series of seven, one-to-one consultancies to London Boroughs. The consultancies were based on individual borough’s needs and covered a broad range of issues including advice on how best to promote a major heritage attraction, assistance with the development of a low cost PR, marketing campaign for a historic part of London and providing tips on how to stimulate business tourism.
Web Toolkit: In 2007, we produced a follow-up to our ‘local tourism’ toolkit. This time the toolkit sought to help boroughs to enhance the effectiveness of their online tourism web presence. The Web Toolkit contained the results of latest research into the role of websites in travel planning and booking . There was also content devoted to providing practical tips on how to improve the effectiveness of borough websites. The two Toolkits are available to download from Visit London’s corporate website . The one-to-one consultancies proved very popular, so much so that we were asked to run a further set of consultancies during Autumn 2007.
