Tourism Marketing Update - 31.03.06

Welcome to this weeks ebulletin packed with information about what the regional tourism marketing team have been up to.

TV Campaign

The final transmission of the TV campaign will be aired today.  In order to follow up this activity and to keep North East England at the forefront of consumers minds, we have booked over 1.6 million inserts to appear in a selection of quality nationals in key target areas namely, Yorkshire, North West and the Central region.  The inserts will generate new requests for the 2006 Holiday and Short Breaks Guide.

a. UK Activity

North East England Cycling Guide

A new 72 page cycling guide has been produced in conjunction with Sustrans.  This new guide features 10 cycle routes including day rides, traffic free trails and forest trails as well as introducing the National Cycle Network.   Key information for the visitor is provided on bike hire, TICs, Preparation for your trip and the ever-useful directory of attractions cross referenced against each cycle route featured.  The guide was launched at The Outdoors Show and requests are already starting to flood in.  A supporting cycling campaign will commence in April.

The Outdoors Show

6 partners joined the regional tourism marketing team at this year's Ordnance Survey Outdoors Show on 17th-19th march 2006 at Birmingham NEC.  The show attracted around 50,000 outdoor enthusiasts over the weekend and proved to be a very successful show.  For the first time the region went under the banner of North East England with a bespoke built stand.  Located in the Explore Britain section of the exhibition, the North East England stand was 24 square metres and incorporated inspirational graphics and the recently launched TV advert.  The stand attracted lots of interest and distribution of both the regional team's and partner literature was extremely good - with over 500 copies of both the walking and cycling guides being picked up over the weekend.
 
The show proved a great success and feedback from visitors about our region was very positive.

Experience North East England campaign

The Experience North East England campaign has to date received over 37,000 individual requests for the 2006 holiday guide and over 45,000 hits to www.visitnortheastengland.co.uk.  A further 1.6 million inserts are booked to run at the end of March/ beginning of April as a follow up to the success of the regions TV campaign and these will feature in various quality nationals including: Mail on Sunday; Guardian Weekend; Saturday Telegraph; Sunday Telegraph; Saturday Times and the Radio Times.

Walking Phase 3

Phase 3 of the walking campaign which aims to acquire new interest for the walking guide has already attracted over 4000 new individual enquiries. 

b. International activity

EnjoyEngland campaign update

We are continually promoting North East England as part of the EnjoyEngland German and Dutch campaigns. To see examples of our activity so far, including direct mail, press and our dedicated website click here.
The campaigns have been a great success for the region to date, and interim results show the North East England web page on the dedicated EnjoyEngland German website (www.enjoyengland.com/de_de) is receiving the 2nd highest rate of click-throughs.

Showcasing the region in Italy

As part of a May-June 2006 Italian campaign with England's North Country (ENC) and VisitBritain, North East England will be advertised as a first-choice holiday destination within the Itinerari Travel Collection publication. A total of 50,000 copies of the publication will be distributed to a key target audience throughout Italy.

Year 8's market Morpeth

This month two representatives from the Tourism Team attended an Enterprising Languages@Work workshop with 30 year 8 pupils from Chantry Middle School, Morpeth. The workshop, the last of 4 events held across the region, was organised by the Education Business Partnership and designed to encourage students to study languages at GCSE and beyond. Following a morning of general knowledge and an introduction to three new languages; Italian, Japanese and Russian, the pupils were asked to create and present a marketing plan for encouraging international visitors to Morpeth. From guidebooks to special tourist taxis, the tourism team returned to the office with some great ideas for the future.

c. PR Activity

The PR team has been busy working on a variety of new enquiries as well as following up key media contacts made at the national and international exhibitions attended during January-March.  Key activity includes:

• Supplying information for a new column in the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine highlighting places that celebrities revisit with their kids
• Presenting a list of August Bank Holiday events to Country Homes & Interiors
• Supplying our media contacts with the Easter events listing
• Assisting Travel & Leisure magazine USA with an enquiry about the number of castles in region
• Collating information for VisitBritain's Garden newsletter
• Leading on a planned visit by Lee Karen Stow freelance travel writer researching material for a feature on 'Taste of Britain' and 'My Bit for Britain'
• Liaising with VisitBritain's overseas offices over future media visits

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