AMT Public

On May 13, 2010, 50 people, representing towns and local authority areas across the country, gathered in Ryedale House in Malton North Yorkshire, to consider ways to attract and retain visitors to their towns.

The seminar began with a presentation from Mike King of amt-i. Mike drew on recent amt-i research to highlight how some towns have improved their town’s offer in the face of the economic downturn. Mike’s presentation illustrated the importance of understanding and benchmarking the views of residents and visitors, to help identify strengths and popular products when developing a ‘vision’ for the town…and showing how this can be done easily through low cost visitor surveys, footfall counting and so on.

See Mike’s town benchmarking presentation

Mike was followed by Ian Shepherd who explained about the work that has been done to count visitor footfall in Malton and the benefits this brings to a town’s marketing programme.

See Ian’s Malton case study presentation

Following a coffee and networking break, Rob Edwards, Director of the Tourism and Marketing organisation Blue Republic, talked about how towns can then use such research data to enable them to identify their ‘Unique Selling Point’ and develop  an overall vision for the town.

See Rob’s ‘Unique Selling Point’ presentation.

Finally, we heard from Lindsey Eaton of Edenbridge Town Council in Kent, who put the presentations into context for us by explaining how Edenbridge went through the process of doing research to identify their strengths and opportunities, developed an action plan of projects and implemented them, with a focus on community and voluntary input, partnership working and small scale funding.

See a presentation of some of the projects of the Eden Valley Tourism Initiative.

After an opportunity for networking and sharing experiences over lunch, Mike and Rob both ran workshops in the afternoon to give delegates the chance to start putting the morning’s theory into practice.

Mike’s workshop gave delegates an opportunity to learn effective and low cost methods of gathering information from local residents, employers and visitors to measure and improve footfall and the visitor economy in their town centre while Rob’s workshop provided tips on identifying the town’s USP and vision.

A second event, to follow at the end of the summer will focus on promoting and marketing their town’s projects.