Canterbury Bid

Promote & Animate

The BID funds events, festivals, and fresh promotional campaigns focused on encouraging dwell time and spend.

Animating the city – We Illuminate and decorate the city to attract customers with Christmas lights from mid-November to early January and colourful hanging flower baskets and bunting from May – October. We also decorate empty units with vinyls, install lamp post banners and most recently an eye-catching umbrella display. Without the BID, these wouldn’t happen.

Event support – Events bring increased footfall, dwell time and overnight stays, and attract visiting friends and relatives. BID supports and runs events that bring more than 285,000 visitors to the city each year. The BID will continue to support events to ensure our city remains a vibrant and creative destination for everyone.

Attract higher-spending visitors – In November 2022, Canterbury BID relaunched the district’s Destination Platform, Visit Canterbury, with a new consortium, targeting visitors, students, locals and new businesses and offering free event and business listings. All activities will be shaped by the BID-commissioned visitor economy strategy – the Destination Management Plan (DMP)  which was created to ensure Canterbury increases it’s visitor economy and high spending visitors over the coming years.

Reaching out to locals – Marketing to inspire locals to be tourists and shoppers in their own city is essential, including residents, staff and students. The people who are going to spend money on a regular basis are those who live within 30 minutes of the city and those who work in and around the city. Canterbury’s significant influence is reflected by the city centre’s extensive shopping catchment area with a population estimated to be over 1,000,000 people. Your BID targets this market to encourage local spending by bringing together Visit CanterburyMyCanterbury and The Canterbury Gift Card.

Free promotional material – The BID will help supply a free repository of high-quality photography, video content, calendar of events, marketing toolkits and stories that can be shared by all businesses to their clients and customers and press. The photos on our Flickr account are free for you to use.