February 19th, 2025
5 Marketing Strategies for Visitor Attraction Footfall
If you are looking for travel PR agency inspiration to drive visitor attraction footfall and enhance your visitor attraction marketing, head to our YouTube channel! Catapult PR’s latest video is an easy-to-digest watch that offers great marketing advice for any visitor attraction wanting to find better and more effective ways of marketing to visitors.
Hosted by Catapult PR’s managing director, Jane Hunt, the video sets the scene by focusing on a real attitudinal issue for many visitor attractions. This is the ‘just because it’s here, they will come’ mentality that assumes that visitors will head to the door, simply because the attraction exists.
As the video explains, at the current time in the UK, this is a dangerous attitude to foster.
New tactics for visitor attraction marketing
Much of this is rooted in old ways of promoting visitor attractions, in a pre-digital age, with the chief obstacle to better marketing being that of over-reliance on the traditional leaflet rack brochure.
Jane explains why that is a bad idea, because of the way in which people actually choose where to visit in 2025. She also explodes the myth that social media is the tool that visitor attractions need to turn to, as they seek to modernise their marketing. Just ‘being’ on social media is probably not the panacea that many imagine and it can be potentially doing nothing to drive visitor footfall.
Five strategies for better visitor attraction marketing
Instead, Jane outlines five key strategies that are tried and tested and which Catapult PR has used on numerous occasions. As a tourism PR specialist, Jane explains how the 37 travel awards that the Lancashire agency has won – a big proportion of the agency’s 67 awards in total, have been for campaigns that have often used these same tactics.
The five steps can really transform marketing success for a visitor attraction of any kind but can equally be used by those in other sectors, becoming the foundations of a dynamic insurance PR and content campaign, for instance, or a retail PR campaign. The tactics have been used to great effect in B2B contexts and B2C too and have together helped Catapult drive significant levels of web traffic to clients’ websites, as well as delivering other important business benefits.
The five strategies are, on the whole however, not being utilised by the majority of visitor attractions and that needs to change, if they wish to attract today’s visitor. Jane explains how these strategies are intended to pull in those who are orbiting the business or attraction and help compel these people to then head to the visitor attraction’s door.
“It’s a quick run through some key strategies, to provide quick pointers, but I am happy to put more flesh on the bones for anyone who wants to chat things through,” says Jane. “What I am suggesting with these five different steps, will probably require a change of marketing mindset for many visitor attractions and heritage attractions. However, if they can think differently, rather than following the crowd and just simply rushing to social media when planning their visitor attraction marketing strategies, it will be well worthwhile. They need to focus on results, rather than just the noise that surrounds social. By treading a different path, they can make great strides.”
Other tourism PR inspiration for visitor attractions
This is the latest travel PR-themed video on Catapult PR’s YouTube channel, which also provides tips and inspiration on other sectors in which the agency excels.
The video also references the various travel and heritage research surveys that Catapult PR has commissioned through independent research companies. This ensures that the agency always has its finger on the pulse of consumer opinion in these key sectors, not to mention others such as the pet trade and the insurance world.
This collateral can all be found in the downloads section of the Catapult PR website, providing additional support for any visitor attraction or business that wishes to get inside the mind of the target visitor or customer.
Catapult PR also has a new leaflet that specifically highlights its tourism PR and travel PR experience, with this of use to any business in this sector who wants to work with a PR and content agency with in-depth experience in this sphere. Read more about this collateral here, or watch the YouTube video that talks you through it.
