Visit Herts was launched as a new destination management organisation in 2015 and over the last few years, we have developed screen tourism as a unique selling point for the county. In 2021, we decided to build on this work and bid for Community Renewal Funding (CRF) in order to maximise the screen tourism opportunities that we had identified - we were delighted to secure this funding in 2022.
The Project
We partnered with The University of Hertfordshire and Hertfordshire Growth Hub to conduct a perception study which helped us to identify and deliver three key pieces of work:
- Support for the creative industries’ supply chain;
- Investment for creative skills and knowledge exchange; and
- Supporting the development of a series of brand-new screen tourism products in order to help rebuild Hertfordshire’s visitor economy following the Covid-19 pandemic.
A Film Friendly Destination
This project has also helped us to develop and promote Hertfordshire as a film-friendly destination through key activity such as conducting a workshop to support new and existing film locations in Hertfordshire; creating a new film makers planning map (which provides information on accommodation and other facilities for crew and casts and their proximity to studios and film locations) and creating assets and content for a campaign to target the film industry.
For our visitors
We created a new section on our website with eight new features which has attracted over 22,000 page views since launching. We also created photography and videography of Hertfordshire and the new products we had developed to be used in our campaigns.
Our first campaign focussed on the destination using a mixture of crime, heritage and general film video content across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube which generated over 750k impressions across all three platforms. We also put in place google search advertising themed around specific films and TV shows that were shot in Hertfordshire which generated over 100k of impressions.
Our second campaign focussed on the new tourism products that were created as part of the CRF programme utilising Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. This generated a total of nearly 2 million impressions across all three platforms and nearly 30,000 clicks. You can find out more here.
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