The BID funds events, festivals, and fresh promotional campaigns focused on encouraging dwell time and spend.
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. This allows you to benefit from free, high-impact, content-rich marketing including business and even listings, national and international campaigns, blogs, guides and more.
Providing impactful seasonal campaigns throughout the year – some led by seasonality (Christmas, Easter, Halloween), some to promote business awareness (Shop Local, Night Out, Summer of Rewards) and some focused on specific events or themes (Pride, Canterbury Festival, It’s in our Nature).
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 Canterbury, MyCanterbury and the Canterbury Gift Card.
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 including the Medieval Pageant and Christmas Light event. We also oversee the city’s Events Calendar – a handy spreadsheet for all businesses to start planning out the year ahead.
Free promotional material – The BID supplies 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.
