Marketing your Scottish tourism business

1. Quality Assurance

Once you've achieved your Quality Assurance (QA) award, you can promote this with pride, whether onsite, in print or digitally. Find out more on our promote your QA award page. 

Visitors are planning and researching their trips online as they’re keen to know that businesses are safe and ready to welcome them. Promoting your QA award provides reassurance and demonstrates your commitment to offering a high quality visitor experience. It also shows that you’re providing a safe environment for your customers and staff. 

The Awaiting Grading status is a fantastic means of conveying to your visitors and peers the commitment you have made to adhering to quality standards, working to a code of conduct, complying with current legislation and using this moment for change to lift the bar in terms of delivering a high standard product.

2. Themed Years

By connecting with the Themed Year, you can ride on the back of our high-profile marketing and ensure your business benefits from some of the coverage it generates. Additionally, we provide you with useful free marketing tools in our Themed Year toolkits to help you do just that. 

Toolkits include relevant marketing resources to help tourism businesses, event organisers and tourism professionals promote themselves to visitors who have an interest in the Themed Years. This includes logos, messaging, imagery and promotional tips.

3. Travel trade

Our travel trade team supports travel intermediaries around the world as they develop and adapt their Scotland programmes for future sale.

We provide valuable platforms and routes to market for Scottish tourism businesses, which in turn drives the development of products and supports sustainable tourism growth. We also have customised business support to help you internationalise and work with travel trade. Visit our travel trade section to find out more. 

4. Shop Local

Shop Local offers the opportunity for communities, local businesses, craft makers, artists, designers and other artisans to promote and sell their products to visitors via our iCentre network. Visit our iCentre advertising page to find out more. 

The initiative is not aimed at established Scottish designers, but rather at regional artisans without a real retail platform. It has been developed to provide a unique sales channel for small businesses producing ‘Made in Scotland’ products, offering visitors the chance to take an authentic, locally-produced piece of Scotland home with them.

5. Engage with our latest campaigns

We’re encouraging visitors to ‘know before you go’ to promote responsible tourism in the widest sense and we’re continuing to work with industry and travel partners to provide them with insight and information to help them welcome visitors as soon as they can.

We encourage you to get involved with our recovery activity to extend messaging and awareness via your channels to maximise the impact.

6. Consumer PR

Our Consumer PR team works with travel and lifestyle media across the globe year-round, to place inspiring destination coverage for Scotland in newspapers, magazines, on TV and online. We work closely with tourism businesses to showcase the best that Scotland has to offer, through our media visit programme and through media outreach.

Find out more about how you can get involved in press trips and other Consumer PR opportunities to show off your business to key travel trade intermediaries and consumer journalists.

7. Our global website - VisitScotland.com

Scotland’s national tourism website, VisitScotland.com, welcomes millions of visitors each year. It provides a global platform to promote Scotland and your business to the world.

We offer freelistings on our website, with a number of promotional features to enable you to showcase your business, increase awareness and drive referrals directly to you. If you already have a web listing, it’s crucial you update it to let visitors know you’re open, following government guidance and what to expect when they visit. Find out more about how to edit or create your free web listing on our global website page.

Don’t miss out on bookings – if you don’t look, they won’t book. We recommend checking your web listing at least monthly to ensure that it mirrors your own website content and imagery.

8. Social media

Our consumer social media activity aims to make Scotland one of the most desired destinations in the world by reaching new audiences with engaging content they'll share to help spread the message.

Getting your content shared by us doesn't need to be difficult - we're always on the lookout for fantastic, relevant content to share with our audience to inspire people about where they can visit in Scotland. A very effective way for us to do this is to showcase the content being produced by industry, bloggers and visitors.

Join in our social media activity and get your content shared on our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter channels.