15. Cheshire [email_address] Cumbria : [email_address] Greater Manchester ; [email_address] Lancashire : [email_address] Liverpool City Region attractions: [email_address] YOUR CONTACTS
Editor's Notes
Welcome to today’s meeting, thank you for coming. Introduce myself Talk through today’s agenda
Briefly talk through the agenda of the day I’m going to talk you through what’s been happening with the IP project and then we have an update from Jonathan Lloyd at ERIH There will also be presentations by two guest speakers. There will then be workshops sessions around three key themes giving everyone a chance to share ideas and best practice. The workshops are How do we get people to visit? – Marketing and promotion How do we get the right people to work here? – skills, apprenticeships, volunteering. How do we pay the bills? – fundraising, grants After these brainstorming sessions there will be an opportunity to feedback so we can all learn from each other. When you arrived you were given colour badges these will be your groups for the workshops. Also when you arrived today you will have been given a pack of information which includes all the marketing literature produced to promote IP and also a feedback form about today’s event, please can you complete this and hand it in at the end of the day. It’s most important that you do this, this event is here to help and be useful to you, only with your feedback can we improve it and provide an event that suits you in the future.
Visit Manchester successfully bid for ERDF funding for the Industrial Powerhouse marketing campaign resulting in a £800k budget up to March 2012. There is also a match funding commitment for the project of the same amount so, in theory that’s 1.6m spent promoting industrial heritage in the Northwest. More money has resulted in 2 full time posts being created, that’s myself Marketing Manager and also a project assistant which means now there are two people working full time on IP. There is also a Steering Group made up of 1 representative from each tourist board and 1 representative from the NWDA, they assist on delivering the project. Plus there’s also an IP Board who oversee the strategic direction of the project
What have we done lately? Updated and re-launched the website summer 09, this now pulls in content from each regional tourist boards destination management system so as long as you are keeping your TB’s up to date with your product information and events then this should automatically feed up into IP. The launch of the site was supported by advertising in key national press and we ran a competition on Facebook aiming at groups talking about industrial heritage. E-Newsletters We have started to send out e-newsletters to the IP database of approx 6000 contacts, with each newsletter we aim to inform readers of a wide variety of events and exhibitions throughout the Northwest. We would like to increase this to a monthly newsletter so we maintain regular contact with the database. We can only do this with your help – please keep us up to date with your news either through your TB or direct to us. Literature Production of a new leaflet which includes 2 key attractions from each tourist board, itinerary ideas and also 2010 highlights – these were produced to distribute at exhibitions.
What have we done lately? Partnership campaigns By partnering with key stakeholders we can extend the reach of their campaigns and ensure greater exposure for IP products. With Visit Lancashire’s Heritage Revealed campaign we secured more brochure exposure for key IP products, developed a treasure trail purely for IP products for an additional direct mail piece to the database, enhanced the online content and ensured signposting to other IP products. For the Manchester Museums Consortium Classic Weekender City Guide we influenced the content to include key IP Manchester locations and included content both in the guide and online to signpost back to the IP site By working with Visit Chester and Cheshire on the events for the Elizabeth Gaskell bi-centenary, we were able to extend the leaflet to include events in Manchester, not just Knutsford, and we have also contributed to a greater print run and wider distribution of the leaflet.
We have been very busy attending a variety of consumer and trade exhibitions to spread the IP message, giving out promotional literature and growing our databases. Bolton to Great Day’s Out – taking the IP message to 1250 establishing a contact database of 100 group travel organisers Who Do You Think You Are 26 – 28 Feb– introducing the IP story to 13,000 people interested in their family history, where they came from and where they worked
For the first time we took stand space for IP at the Best of Britain and Ireland show. This was from 17 to 20 March and we featured 5 attractions, 1 from each sub region which were selected by the tourist board for that region, we distributed IP information and ran an Elizabeth Gaskell themed competition to build the database The IP space was in the NW of the show, exhibiting between Manchester and Cumbria, so we are really trying to establish the industrial heritage and northwest story. Consumer - over 5000 consumers Trade – over 2500 trade contacts
Online visitors – over 1000 unique visitors per month Database – over 6000 contacts These figures are our starting point with little or no activity to promote Industrial Powerhouse, hopefully next time we meet after we have implemented marketing campaigns I’m hoping these will be greatly increased. Press and PR – AVE £88k for 09/10 with articles in press as varied as Time Out London, Guardian online and Industrie Kultur, we have also recently run a press trip for journalists from History Today and Heritage magazine, they took in places as varied as PHM, East Lancashire Railway, Harris Museum & Art Gallery and the ending up in the Grand Theatre Blackpool! We are hoping for lots of press coverage for this in the near future.
These are a few key points that came out of the workshop sessions last time, and hopefully in the next few slides when you see what our plans are you can see how we are tackling these and if we haven’t tackled them yet they are on our to do list!
What is Industrial Powerhouse? Where is it? Where’s the Northwest? These are some of the comments we hear when we take Industrial Powerhouse out to the general public. It’s apparent that we are not clearly communicating with our consumers. We have profiled our existing database and found that respondents who have an interest in history and heritage think the name fits however almost a third of respondents were confused over the name. So we decided to do something about it, we’ve appointed Creative Concern to review the brand Industrial Powerhouse. As part of this process they will review existing research, engage with stakeholders, hold focus groups, meet our current customers, and meet people who could be our customers. At the end of the process they will come up with a brand position for IP which will give us clear direction on how we should be communicating with our customers what words and phrases to use what tone of voice and what we should call ourselves if the research shows our name doesn’t work. We will also use the results and guidelines to address our creative look and appearance both on and offline. This process has just started so we will share the results with you in a couple of months time and keep you posted via our newsletter to you.
Improve the website More dynamic content on home page – pushing key events, trails, places of interest out to the home page so that the content keeps changing and updating, giving people a reason to come back to the site and hopefully inspire them to make a visit, at the moment visitors have to interrogate the site to find out what’s on Specialist sections – we want to develop specialist sections for genealogy, group travel, schools Planning your trip – itinerary planning, suggested search function, linking attractions together by locality and or genre Food and drink – at the moment places to eat and drink are not included and they need to be – we are hoping to solve this. Online booking, we currently don’t have the option for users to book online they have to click through to each respective hotels website
The Northwest has a wide variety of product focussed around the waterways, we want to develop this theme, so we are going to put together a campaign to promote all the various activities around our waterways, canal trips, boat trips, tow path activity – walking, cycling, eating along the waterways, museums, festivals, also working with British Waterways on this and possibly linking up with private sector companies Blakes and Hoseasons Boating to promote the region in the brochures and online to their national audiences. It was suggested last time we met that we explore the sporting heritage of the region– rugby, cycling, football - National Football Museum is moving to Manchester which is going to raise its profile. We are also looking at new markets Genealogy is a key growth area, it’s a niche market but a growing market, people do make trips when tracing their family history and we are hoping to develop web content which provides information on archive resources in the NW, places to stay and also signpost them to museums and attractions in the region which can provide a real sense of what life was like for their ancestors. As the birthplace of the Industrial revolution, there is a rich resource here for education groups to visit the area where we can tell the story of our industrial heritage. To develop the education offering it would be useful to know what resources you have as a venue – do you have an education team and if so how can we work together, please feedback to your education teams and let them know this is an area we want to develop and we want to work with you on this. Groups is a key market for us as group travel itineraries will generally want to include ‘a place of interest’ within their itinerary and we want to develop online content to assist in itinerary planning and develop links with the group travel market to promote our products.
We are going to look at opportunities to adopt new technology through developing audio trails, augmented trails, looking at smart phone apps Using video both archive and new to enhance the web content.
We need you to feed us with as much information as possible, are you having an event, do you have a news story to share? Have you discovered something new and amazing in your archives. When is your next exhibition? Anything that you think might be interesting to the customer let us know then we can communicate this via tweets, facebook and our newsletter. We want to grow our social media activity to engage with audiences interested in industrial heritage, tell them what’s on, where they can go with their families but we cannot do this without your news to promote. So please let us know. This is me being a detective looking for your stories – it will be easier and more likely that your news gets included if you let us know. We also need you to make sure you continue to keep your tourist boards updated with your news and events, feed them in so they can add to the DMS, then remember to tell them its for IP and then you will be on both your regional tourist board site and the IP site
These are the contact details for your respective tourist board to update their websites But please remember to let us know directly so we can promote your events. And now I can hand you over to Jonathan Lloyd from ERIH Thank you
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