Culture as a driver for leisure tourism - by Julie Fossitt
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The document discusses using cultural products and assets to drive leisure tourism in Kingston, Canada. It outlines recommendations to create an environment where cultural tourism stakeholders can work together and develop a tourism strategy leveraging Kingston's culture and heritage. A pilot project was conducted surveying residents in surrounding cities about Kingston's culture and engaging digital influencers with a tour. Results showed low awareness of Kingston's cultural amenities but interest in visiting as an "arts hub." This informed the adoption of a unified branding approach across tourism partners with pillars of being authentically hip, culturally vibrant, and constantly evolving. Metrics showed engagement and reach increasing since implementing the new strategy.
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Culture as a driver for leisure tourism - by Julie Fossitt
- 2. Thank you! Julie Fossitt ~ Manager, Cultural Marketing for City of Kingston You can connect with me anytime after the conference at jfossitt@cityofkingston.ca or @juliefossitt on Twitter and Instagram
- 3. Agenda - Overview of Kingston as a city - Cultural policy and investment over the past decade - Identifying one voice - Who are you talking to? - Results from the unified brand - Next steps - What you can do
- 7. Recommendations, Kingston Culture Plan: • That Cultural Services work with the Office of the CAO and KEDCO to create an environment for cultural tourism stakeholders to work together. • That the City of Kingston develop a tourism strategy that leverages Kingston’s cultural and heritage assets and distinctive identity.
- 9. Predicated on two important assumptions: 1. Kingston’s history and heritage comprise a compelling resource. Located at the confluence of three bodies of water, its evolution as a community is closely associated with the development of Canada as a nation of nations. It is a story that begins with Aboriginal peoples and expands to include centuries of settlement, immigration and migration. 2. Increased investment in cultural tourism represents a cost effective way to grow the tourism market in Kingston. By continuing to invest in, develop and sustain the range of historical and cultural assets in Kingston, cultural tourism has the potential to benefit residents and visitors alike by making it a great place to live and a great place to visit.
- 10. Based on two key actions: 1. Improve the cultural experiences and products. • Stories to be shared • Enhance existing assets • New and improved experiences 2. Make these cultural experiences and products market- ready. • Focus on subject matter, content and delivery • Visitor-focused • Be responsive • Bundle experiences
- 11. Connect the Stakeholders • Cultural Services as connector and facilitator • Get everybody working together • Set standards and guidelines to guide product improvement Improve the Product • Using standards and guidelines to improve key products • Focus on placemaking and content creation • Develop powerful narratives • Work toward achieving cultural advantage Make the Products Market-ready • Improve products in terms of content, operations, marketing and delivery • Improve the quality of operations of the product providers • Cluster the experiences to respond to market preferences and needs Top Line Priorities:
- 12. Pilot Project
- 13. Objectives: 1.Promote the re-opening of the J.K. Tett Centre, together with the opening of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts 2.Emphasize local history and the efforts being made to preserve and re-present it through initiatives designed to re- purpose Kingston’s built heritage and animate it in ways that make it meaningful to contemporary users and audiences; 3.Celebrate Kingston as a place that values culture, fosters creativity and offers a wide range of cultural offerings that are accessible and interesting to a cross-section of people; and 4.Demonstrate the potential of cultural tourism through collaboration and identify performance measures/indicators that can be used to assess its benefits and impacts.
- 14. Tactics: • Identify an initial group of stakeholders • Survey residents from Kingston and surrounding cities to gauge cultural product awareness and interest in travelling to Kingston • Engage a group of out-of-town digital media influencers as focus group through a familiarization tour • Hire a tourism consultant to meet with stakeholders and to develop a positioning statement for Kingston
- 15. Findings
- 16. Survey results: • A total of 1,200 interviews (300 in each of Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Kingston) were completed in November and December of 2014 • Leisure travel is high across the three target cities and Kingston • Kingston is not top of mind for future travel especially at this time of year • Many short getaway trips planned for Ontario in next 2 years – some opportunity for Kingston • Interest in heritage buildings and sites along with beautiful scenery presents an opportunity to promote “arts hub” • Awareness of cultural amenities like the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts and the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning is fairly low in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto – high in Kingston • Interest in visiting “arts hub” is fairly high among Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal travellers
- 17. Digital media “fam” tour results: • Reactions were unanimously positive. Kingston surprised and delighted the visitors. Many had thought they were coming to visit a place known almost exclusively as a prison and university town. • “The Isabel”: This performance/learning facilities surprised and delighted at every turn. • “The Agnes”: Most of the guests claimed the art gallery was at a level worthy of some of the finest galleries they had seen. The collections and exhibitions were professional, diverse and intriguing. • The Tett Centre: It demonstrated Kingston’s commitment to community and to successful collaborations combining recreational and professional artists, and art groups. The Tett is a showcase for municipal investment and a model for other municipalities.
- 18. Overall results from the Pilot Project: • We are not doing a good job telling the Kingston story • There is no Kingston brand • We need to get all of the tourism players on the same page • Consultant Greg Klassen: “The unique selling point for Kingston has to be true and authentic”
- 20. The first year with ‘one voice’
- 23. Who are you talking to?
- 24. You can’t target your audience by age any more!
- 33. Local Food
- 35. The Lobby blog:
- 37. Great Eats in Kingston 38,303 People Reached 305 Likes 81 Shares
- 39. Sharing + Engagement 50 Things to do in Kingston May [2016] Edition 105,751 People Reached 412 Likes 249 Shares
- 45. ‘one voice’ across markets
- 50. Results
- 51. Why is this approach working in Kingston?
- 52. • It has engaged a connected group of stakeholders • There was trust in the outcomes of the findings report • There was a willingness to take risks and go after markets that were not being targeted (millennials and the millennially-minded) • Embraced what is authentic as the unique selling proposition for Kingston • Equipped the tourism partners with the tools needed to contribute effectively • Have emphasized data and the need to measure, measure, measure!
- 53. How can you advocate for culture as unique selling point?
- 54. • Cultural tourism as a component of leisure tourism is moving to mainstream in relation to both boomers and millennials who are seeking experiences • Do not be afraid to push DMOs to recognize the value and impact of leisure tourism along with a focus on more traditional and easily measured forms of tourism like conferences, travel/trade and sport tourism • Market the place as much as the products
- 55. • Cultural organizations must be at the table with tourism stakeholders in order to actively contribute to the development of a meaningful and authentic local strategy • Destination marketing organizations must demonstrate return on investment so cultural organizations need to communicate with data-driven strategies and tactics • Cultural product development must consider the potential audience(s) and cannot be created in isolation • Partnering with tourism marketing organizations can offer new funding streams, access to marketing expertise and new audiences
- 56. Thank you! Julie Fossitt Manager, Cultural Marketing Cultural Services City of Kingston (613) 546-4291 ext. 1143 jfossitt@cityofkingston.ca Twitter and Instagram @juliefossitt
Editor's Notes
- Introduction as to who I am and why I am here.
- Show of hands - has anyone been to Kingston, Ontario? And stopping at the McDonald’s at Division St. and the 401 does not count! Describe unique geographic position of the space.
- When I moved to Kingston in 2007, the photos above were the cornerstone of the tourism campaign for the City. Built heritage, Fort Henry, fresh water sailing capital of the world and beautiful natural places for hiking.
- Fast forward a few years, and the City’s first culture plan was unanimously approved by Council in 2010. This ten year plan has a whopping 60 recommendations. And, happy to say that we have already complete close to 80% of them.
- Two of the recommendations in the Kingston Culture Plan specifically related to tourism.
- A few years later we developed an Integrated Cultural Heritage and Cultural Tourism Strategy and it was approved by Council in 2014. Unfortunately the cost for the recommendations was *** and we didn’t have the funding to implement all of them. As public servants, we often have strategic plans that make a lot of sense, but are incredibly difficult to implement because we don’ t have the funds and / or we don’t have the buy in from external partners. Our small department could not pull off the execution of this huge strategy on our own. As public
- The Cultural Services staff are biased, as we have a deep love and respect for cultural product and experience. Also, I can’t stress this enough – authentic product and experience is paramount to any visitor experience. You can only promote and develop products and experiences that are REAL. I know a few of Will Baird’s staff are here today, and he taught me about the phrase “lunch-bag letdown”. Basically, you can have a shiny marketing campaign, but if the actual delivery is sub-par and not what was expected, that will guarantee poor word of mouth and no repeat visitors. The assumptions above are what we believed in. These assumptions are rooted in truth.
- So, what next? In order to avoid that lunch-bag letdown, we had to take those cultural products and polish them up so they were market ready. Great stories and places that can’t be experienced are not worth promoting.
- So, we did a chart to show council that we had priorities and had a plan for a pilot project. This gave us some seed funding to rolling.
- Identifed the objectives to not only capitalize on quick wins, but to see if we could take some of the authentic products in Kingston and make them market ready. Also, we wanted to see if this was actually viable, so we made sure to identify some key performance indicators that we could measure. Basically, we needed to test if what we believed would stand up.
- How did we do this?
- Lots of statistics here, but the most important was despite being in a great geographic location for travellers in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, Kingston was not top of mind, and certainly not in fall, winter or spring.
- One of the most fascinating experiences for me was the results from a digital media fam tour. Tourism organizations for many years have organized familiariation tours, which traditionally were all-expense paid trips for travel writers to try and land an article or photo essay in a magazine or newspaper. Kingston decided to have a digital media fam, which would engage digital influencers including bloggers and instagrammers to take photos and video, share them with their thousands of followers, and offer their sincere feedback on the cultural product. Did I mention they came to Kingston the last weekend in January?
- In conclusion:
- Identifying one voice:
- Paid media continues to evolve; Continuous digital effort(40%) - more video and mobile (50% of visits mobile) Content Marketing - uncovering people and stories to share Owned Media Influencer Outreach Experiential events Connecting with Kingston creative community to help shape and share the new brand position Ontario 55% Quebec 25% U.S. 18%
- Paid media continues to evolve; Continuous digital effort(40%) - more video and mobile (50% of visits mobile) Content Marketing - uncovering people and stories to share Owned Media Influencer Outreach Experiential events Connecting with Kingston creative community to help shape and share the new brand position Ontario 55% Quebec 25% U.S. 18%
- Audience participation portion for prizes! I need everyone who is between the ages of 20 and 29 to raise their hands. – Choose one person to come up to the front. In need everyone who is between the ages and 30 and 45 to raise their hands. – Choose one person. In need someone who is aged 55 or older to raise their hands – Choose one person. I need each of you to write down the last vacation who went on and what your favourite part of it was. - Then each ask person to show their answer and ask them if they took photos
- I often joke that marketing solves everything, because if you have a great product or experience, but no one knows about it, what is the point? How can you make an existing product accessible to a wider audience or create a new product that will appeal to more than one type of person?
- Prison tour slide – get stats from Krista
- Kingston Food Tours just launched last year and had more than 500 guests take 68 tours. They have expanded with a Beers and Bites tour this year and hope to sell more than 1000 tickets. These tours connect visitors with chefs and offer insight into local food.
- The Kick and Push festival is a contemporary theatre festival that launched in 2015. It offers theatre in uniquely Kingston spaces like this production called Autoshow that took place in 7 different cars in Springer Market Square.
- Lumina Borealis launched in December 2016 and is a fantastic journey through Fort Henry. Moment Factory transformed an attraction that is closed during the winter season into
- Two years ago the K-Pass was launched. This one-stop shop lets visitors not only hop on and off the tour trolley, but offers admission to a huge number of museums. Many of the smaller museums have very limited marketing budgets and this has helped get more people through their doors and
- Limestone Tattoo Festival had its first iteration this past September and was standing room only. I tried to get an appointment with a tattoo artist and they were sold out weeks before.
- How do you speak to people of different ages and backgrounds? Through compelling digital media and fantastic content! We have one website for visitors, that launched one year ago. The DMO and the DMO share the website so they don’t have to compete for eyeballs through Google. They make the website full of great content that can be shared and shared on social media. No sales pitches here!
- - increased overall Group Interactions by 31% to 58,300 - over 60,000 incoming messages
- - increased overall Group Interactions by 31% to 58,300 - over 60,000 incoming messages
- Continue to source, connect and engage with influencers across media and areas of interest Dedicated role and focus now in place
- Local creatives lead the design process - creating a unique Kingston blend of merchandise for sale in VIC and online Like the band, buy the t-shirt - people will carry the brand forward
- Put selfie banner image here
- Meetings and Conferences video
- Building trust. Yes we can vs. no we can’t. Mayor is very tied to economic development. The USP is based on truth and actual product and experiences available – not just a marketing campaign Look at the gaps and address those gaps Social media audits, content marketing playbook and brand guides Kingston alley. We are too small to work alone. Identify as many key performance indicators as possible and share those metrics to remain transparent
- Kingston is a small city that has a lot of challenges. We don’t have the marketing budgets that bigger cities have, but we have been able to get everyone on the same page and working together has strengthened the clarity of the marketing message and then
- Ask staff to serve on volunteer committees and support partnership initiatives with tourism organizations – they often have a lot more money than arts and culture organizations. Culture is cool, so show that. DMOs often report to economic development and exist to have bring money into a community. Cultural organizations need to be able to assist them to reach their goals, but must be able to demonstrate ROI. Curators and producers cannot
- Ask staff to serve on volunteer committees and support partnership initiatives with tourism organizations – they often have a lot more money than arts and culture organizations. Culture is cool, so show that. DMOs often report to economic development and exist to have bring money into a community. Cultural organizations need to be able to assist them to reach their goals, but must be able to demonstrate ROI. Curators and producers cannot