Client: uktourism.co.uk

A creative approach to media relations

uktourism.co.uk is a web portal owned and managed by Lifestyle Media Group. LMG’s clients are many of the UK’s major tourist boards and visitor organisations, which make the holiday brochures for their regions available to the public via the site. Consumers can order the brochure or brochures in which they are interested free of charge direct from uktourism.co.uk, with LMG earning a fee from the respective tourist board for each brochure ordered and fulfilled. 

Our objectives were:
• to raise the profile of the portal
• to drive traffic to the site and increase the number of brochures ordered
• to encourage UK ‘staycations’ so that LMG can demonstrate its commitment to promoting their clients’ regions

Quay West created a series of topical media stories which would assist in promoting the UK as a holiday destination for UK residents. We set out to create angles that would enable us to target national, regional and interest-specific media. These included: the seven natural wonders of Britain; the seven best man-made additions to the great British holiday; Gastronomic Britain, and Green holidays. We also drew heavily on statistics available from the client to explore trends in UK holidays.

We also set up and managed a uktourism.co.uk Twitter feed and Facebook group and immediately began targeting relevant followers and promoting both the web site, the company’s prize offer of £1000 worth of UK holiday vouchers and used this as a way of extending the reach of the media stories that are addressed in this document.

During the course of the four week campaign, Quay West delivered 51 pieces of coverage with opportunities to see for more than one million people.

Ginna Clark, managing director of Lifestyle Media Group, commented that with PR the primary marketing tool applied to the market, the uktourism portal had shown a significant increase in traffic and brochure download requests year on year and, as importantly, “the coverage generated by Quay West, which was imaginative and creative in its approach, armed our sales staff with collateral that we find extremely useful in enabling them to bring new customers to the company.”