How to beat the recession on the high street
By Katie Fewings • Aug 5th, 2010 • Category: NewsAMT’s top 10 tips to beating the recession on the high street
- Get the basics right: Signage and car parking are important – if your customers can’t park or find their way around you will lose them. Our consultancy organisation amt-i can help you with signage audits and car parking studies.
- Organise events: Events are a good way to get people back in to your town – and not just at Christmas.
- Know your customers: A Town Centre Services package from amt-i includes business training, mystery shopping and visitor surveys.
- Encourage loyalty: Loyalty schemes are a great way to boost business. amt-i can help in setting up a loyalty scheme for your town.
- Joint marketing: Link up with neighbouring towns to create a destination for visitors.
- How well are you doing? We can lead you through an innovative online Town Benchmarking programme to review your town’s retail offering, number of vacant units, traditional markets and business confidence and compare it to neighbours and other similar towns across the country.
- Learn from others: Our Towns-4-Towns scheme helps you learn from the success of projects in other towns. Local networks of towns let you share good ideas – AMT has already established one such network collaboration with North Yorkshire County Council.
- Check out case studies of good practice: The AMT website has an online library of nearly 200 case studies of successful projects in towns throughout the country to give members inspiration and practical advice.
- Find your way through the policy jungle: AMT members have access through our website to policy information as well as help in putting policy into practice.
- Join Action for Market Towns: Membership opens up a whole range of services to your town. Read about more member benefits.
See our Prosperous Places campaign for more tips and advice.
Katie Fewings is Katie graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2000 with a BA in Modern Languages (French, Spanish & Portuguese).
She honed her organisational skills over nearly four years as PA to the Director of an internationally renowned firm of architects in London before moving to Brighton and taking up the post of Project Manager at the online ethical travel directory, responsibletravel.com. In this role, she organised the annual Responsible Tourism Awards with partners World Travel Market, The Telegraph, Geographical Magazine and BBC World News, and facilitated a programme to develop and support community based tourism with the Washington NGO, Conservation International.
Katie has a strong interest in issues of sustainability and social responsibility, and has set up her own website, Ethical Weddings (www.ethicalweddings.com) to help couples plan the wedding of their dreams without compromising their values. She also co-founded Our Ethical Network in Brighton to give ethically motivated businesses in the city the chance to meet one another, share common problems and explore business opportunities.
Katie is developing AMT's online presence and helping towns to share knowledge and best practice from their successful initiatives through online networking in the new AMT Forums and other social media.
She works Tuesdays and Thursdays and can be contacted on 07876 701 266 or by email at katie.fewings@towns.org.uk.
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