CT Consults

Archive for April, 2018

2021: a cultural odyssey

Posted on: April 30th, 2018 by ctceditor

We are so pleased to be working with the Coventry City of Culture team. Still 3 years out, we are impressed by how much the team is already committed to investing in the future legacy – in this instance ensuring that the city’s cultural, heritage, tourism and marketing partners can play a full part in amplifying the Coventry messages and ensure lasting returns.

A practical digital audit is the starting point – using detailed analytics to assess the digital marketing capacity and capabilities of over 25 key organisations – all to help drive the necessary investment in infrastructure and build good, joined-up digital practices as the foundations for successful online positioning, visibility and visitor engagement. The process will be phased to allow assessment and adjustment to best serve capacity and skills development, through a series of practical training workshops, resource provision (including online and remote) and facilitated exercises and pilot activity. This will allow for particular issues to be highlighted and focused on, whether that was Google Ad Grants eligibility, creating ‘search engine friendly’ websites, using Google Search Console to identify issues with crawling/indexing content, or how to monitor and optimise the performance of campaigns.

View CTConsults’ case study – Coventry UK City of Culture 2021

Hit the North

Posted on: April 27th, 2018 by ctceditor

Last year we worked on a Discover England Fund pilot project linking the cultural offer across four northern cities and testing the appeal and logistics of a Transpennine Cultural Rover rail ticket. Together with tourism associates TEAM Consulting, we have been further commissioned to extend and embed this as part of the expanded five cities of the North of England Transpennine project, led by Marketing Liverpool, a division of Liverpool Vision.

Building directly on the learning, this time the North of England City Experience project includes NewcastleGateshead as well as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull to assess the cities’ cultural, tourism and lifestyle offers with particular appeal to the millennial markets of Germany, The Netherlands and Norway.

The second strand of work is tackling how to support bookability and marketing, via an online platform.  The work is already revealing new insights into the behaviours, values and interests of this rising international travel market, how to position places as credible cultural destinations with them, and how to get the product to market.

 

About the Discover England Fund 

In November 2015, the Government announced a £40 million Discover England Fund, an unprecedented opportunity for English tourism. The Fund delivers world-class bookable tourism products, joined up across geographies and/or themes; including integrated transport solutions to provide an end-to-end customer experience.

The Fund supports the growth of one of England’s most valuable export industries, inbound tourism. Tourism is an industry that delivers jobs and economic growth across the English regions.  The Fund supported 20 pilot projects in year one (2016/17) that tested product development approaches.  In years two and three, 2017-19, the fund will support:

 

Image: NewcastleGateshead

It’s time to graduate

Posted on: April 13th, 2018 by ctceditor

Did you know that The Whitworth, Manchester Museum, John Rylands Library and Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre are all part of the University of Manchester, accounting for 1.2m visitors every year? Working closely with the University’s Social Responsibility team and our associate John Knell (of Intelligence Agency and a UoM alumni), we are exploring how the university can reposition itself as a cultural university and what that means for Manchester.

Despite having worked with this University over many years, we’re still uncovering a new breadth and depth of cultural offer across teaching, research, libraries and archives, specialist schools, partnerships, cultural practice and artists, and of course its cultural institutions – exploring its purpose and place within the wider city.

 

Image: Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre

Taking the waters (in Buxton)… to another level

Posted on: April 2nd, 2018 by ctceditor

Often cultural heritage tourism focuses on maximising the assets a place has – museums, castles, gardens, waterfront and so on. For some it is about rediscovering and reimagining past glory. Sometimes both. Enter Buxton. The jewel of the High Peak, it has stunning, historic buildings and gardens. It is one of only two thermal spas in the country (Bath is the other – another CTConsults client coincidentally), and is located pretty much only “an hour from everywhere” as locals put it.

As a town, it is benefiting from more heritage investment than most every other comparable place you can think of. The magnificent Crescent is the obvious centrepiece, and is undertaking a massive transformation, helping to reinvigorate the town as much as ’taking the waters’ will do for its patrons. We have just been asked by the town, with our partners Yellow Railroad, Creative Heritage and Sara Hilton Associates to develop a visitor economy strategy that fully integrates the potential of heritage into its planning, from asset management right through to campaigns. We will produce plans that identify and develop a series of transformational elements for Buxton – brand, culture, place, visitor experience, wraparound offer, leadership – which build on the organisational and asset base of the town and its partners.

View CtConsults’ case study – A visitor economy strategy to help us to ‘take the waters’ once more

Image: Buxton Opera House, courtesy Pure Buxton

 

Some news

Do you think we can help?

Then get in touch

We’re serious about protecting your privacy and won’t share your details with anyone, ever. (read our privacy policy)

    Sign up to our newsletter

     

    Keep in touch to see our latest projects, thoughts and news. We promise we’ll only send you interesting content.