Community placemaking offers an opportunity to visually enhance your destination in a way that attracts visitors. It helps highlight your community’s character and personality, improves your residents’ quality of life and supports the area’s economic vitality. According to this article, there are four important design principles to keep in mind to help you strategically highlight your region’s strengths.

• Establish a theme for your community’s space.
• Create safe access and accommodations for residents and visitors.
• Implement wayfinding to notify visitors when they’ve entered a new space.
• Incorporate amenities to encourage visitors to stay longer in the area.

This article from Tourwriter delves into a discussion about the future of travel in 2021 and beyond. It’s no secret that the pandemic has had a significant impact on the travel industry and market, so it’s imperative that travel businesses prepare for a changing landscape. Here are some takeaways:

• Travel needs to be sustainable for the planet and for communities.
• Travelers want to be connected as they travel and be assured that they will receive reliable information at a moment’s notice.
• The industry might pivot to fully flexible and independent travel instead of group travel.
• As travel becomes more complex, travelers will be looking to experts more than ever.

As a platform that allows for sharing interesting and quick videos, TikTok allows small businesses and local Main Street programs to expand their social presence. Main Street America shares some stories of businesses who used TikTok and their experience with this unique and wildly popular social media platform. One Main Street program, Charles Town Now, reports that using this platform is a way for their community to share their “true identity.”

“TikTok allows a business or Main Street program to have a personality. This personality, being relatable and fun, shows the other side of our downtown/community,” Charles Town Now Executive Director Elizabeth Cook said.

Whether you are in economic development, tourism or a similar kind of organization, you know you need funding to keep doing your good work. What you might not know is that marketing is a key avenue for more funding and more visitors. Here are some tips for using marketing to make your heritage destination or community stand out to grantors:

• Start with a marketing plan and strategy that lays out the cost of your heritage tourism project.
• Make your plan come to life with projections on how marketing will impact your heritage area.
• Include details in your marketing plan to prove that there will be ROI in your heritage tourism marketing project.