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Visit Scotland | Alba

Our partnership marketing is designed to enhance our collective reach, expertise, and impact. Working as one, our partnership campaigns comprise joint or upweighted marketing initiatives, like:

  • promoting a particular region
  • product themes like UNESCO
  • sector themes like Days Out (attractions)
  • national partner campaigns like with Caledonian Sleeper

We work to understand your unique objectives. These could take the form of reaching new audience segments or markets, or utilising capacity at certain times of the year. And we would like to offer relevant opportunities that maximise our marketing resources and deliver added value.

Our partnership marketing team would love to hear from you if you’d like to discuss joint working. Do get in touch anytime on marketing@visitscotland.com. 

1. Marketing opportunities

Working together, we create detailed plans tailored to specific regions, partners or sectors. This ensures that our support is aligned with the needs of businesses and communities.

We share the latest insights and intelligence to shape relevant ideas and effective activity plans. We also share learnings with you from past activity, enabling us to set benchmarks and establish what success looks like.

We constantly measure and evaluate our processes as we work together to deliver you the greatest return.

Benefits of working with us

  • Feature in our worldwide paid media efforts

    We offer an integrated global marketing activity for all our partners throughout the year.

    Working with us, you can easily market your business to a wide audience around the world.

  • Joint and regional campaigns

    We can work with you on bespoke campaigns from objective settings to help you with:

    • creative development
    • campaign delivery
    • optimising your campaign

    You can benefit from our experienced marketing and creative teams, and agency relationships. They consistently work to deliver performant, award-winning marketing.  

    We deliver regional marketing campaigns and activities for councils and destination management organisations.

  • Make use of our tools and channels

    Get best practice and business advice on our website and through our Industry Relationship Managers.

    Browse our Industry Relationship Managers page.

    Our media toolkit provides a host of multimedia assets that you can use to help promote Scotland and your offering.

    Browse our media toolkit.

  • Share your messages with us and amplify your marketing efforts

    Aligning your great stories with our marketing calendar allows you to benefit from the synergy of our collective voice.

    Browse our marketing calendar.

    You can work with our PR experts to share newsworthy items and help us to pitch you to our global media contacts.

    Work with our press team.

2. National campaigns

In the past couple of years, we partnered up to deliver Scotland's UNESCO Trail and the Great Days Out campaign.

Scotland's UNESCO Trail

Scotland’s UNESCO Trail is a world first. It consists of some of Scotland’s most iconic, diverse, and culturally significant sites. These are brought together into a single, globally accessible digital space.

This dedicated digital trail features our 13 place-based UNESCO designations, including:

  • world heritage sites
  • biospheres
  • global geoparks
  • creative cities

It takes visitors on a cultural journey across the country, allowing visitors to experience:

  • archaeology and history
  • design, music and literature
  • nature and science

The trail was built upon the values of UNESCO and its sustainable development goals. It aimed to leverage tourism as a force for good, maximising collaboration. This encouraged more responsible travel behaviours and spread the benefits of tourism.

Our campaign activity sought to raise the profile of the designations. It encouraged a strong spread of visitors across regions and seasons from primarily key short-haul markets in Europe.

To maximise a return on our investment, we combined high-reach paid posts with in-depth editorial and video content. We delivered these through a variety of carefully selected, trusted partners and influencers. These partners all shared the values of the UNESCO Trail.

We launched a toolkit to get our industry and partners as engaged and enthused about the trail as possible.

Our paid media activities ran in targeted bursts between October 2023 and April 2023. In August 2023, it had a reach of 40 million and 310,000 video views.

Our Insights team are conducting a detailed research project into the economic impact of Scotland’s UNESCO Trail. This will be completed in 2024.  

The trail has drew the attention of other countries who are keen to learn from our experiences to create their own UNESCO digital trails.

We want to get further investment and responsible industry development for this project. One way of doing so is around the new UNESCO designation status awarded to Perth as City of Crafts and Folk Art.

Browse our UNESCO Trail page.

Read our UNESCO Trail toolkit.

Great Days Out campaign

On this campaign, we worked with ASVA, Historic Environment Scotland, Scotrail, and the Year of Stories team. Its goal was to boost demand for visitor attractions and outdoor experience operators for the shoulder season.

It particularly targeted families across Scotland and northern England. It also aimed to join the dots between attractions offers and sustainable, low-cost travel.

We created a new landing page for this campaign on visitscotland.com. This showcased and linked to participating businesses who offered discounted tickets and offers.

Following a drop in footfall post pandemic, the campaign set out to reestablish consumer confidence. It also tried to inspire them to explore all the amazing attractions on their doorsteps and across Scotland.

The campaign was multi-layered. We matched activity with ScotRail across publishing and digital ads. This leveraged their "Kids for a Quid" offer and achieved reach of 5 million impressions on Teads and almost 20,000 clicks.

We had a content partnership with DC Thomson. This included the much-loved Dennis and Gnasher characters and secured 249,000 impressions on social media.

We also had a content partnership with the Primary Times. We delivered email marketing to a targeted database of 13,000 subscribers.

Our Year of Stories themed content told the stories of our many visitor attractions using the Reach media platform. This saw an average dwell times of 2 minutes 21 seconds on article features.   

Our social media channels saw an extensive PR coverage in regional press, such as:

  •  the Scottish Sun Travel section
  • the Sunday Post
  • Breaking Travel News

21,000 people found our custom landing page on visitscotland.com via search engines. Over 39,000 Historic Environment Scotland attractions were viewed on our web listings.

Looking ahead, there are fresh and ongoing challenges facing the attractions sector. We're working with the following partners to deliver a new Days Out campaign for 2023-2024:

  • Good Journeys, champions of sustainable travel
  • Historic Environment Scotland
  • Scotland’s Towns Partnership
  • Scotrail

3. Regional campaigns

In 2022 and 2023, we partnered up to deliver regional campaigns in Fife, East Lothian, the Highlands, and with the Caledonian Sleeper.

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