Project case study: support for County Durham tourism and hospitality businesses

In a nutshell

Between September 2023 and March 2025, the Durham Business Growth Programme has been funding specialist business support, across a range of sectors, for businesses based in County Durham.

Tourism specialists Avenue Six have been commissioned to deliver the specialist support for tourism and hospitality businesses.

This includes any visitor economy or related businesses, including for example attractions, venues (hospitality, cultural, conference, wedding), accommodation (hotels, cottages, camping), experiences, and services (guides, information).

Eligible County Durham businesses benefit from free, tailored support from sector experts to help them improve and grow.

As of November 2024, businesses can still apply for one of the few remaining places here.

Having worked successfully with Avenue Six on previous support projects for Somerset businesses during the pandemic, Graham Soult from CannyInsights.com was written into Avenue Six’s proposal as part of the intended project delivery team.

Graham’s skills and expertise – focusing particularly on retail, online trading, and website advice – complement those of the core Avenue Six team.

What we’ve done

With Avenue Six taking the lead on project management, and on the development of tailored action plans for businesses, Graham’s role within the project has been threefold:

• Using his extensive networks and contacts across County Durham to assist with recruiting businesses to the programme.

• Delivering selected one-to-one consultations with businesses, where recommended in the action plans, on retail and ecommerce-related areas (conducted via Zoom).

• Hosting interactive “masterclass” webinars for participating businesses, covering two topics that have proven useful and popular in other locations: “What makes a great website?” and “Setting up and using your Google Business Profile listing”.

What impact we’ve had

To date, we have delivered the “What makes a great website?” webinar twice, taking participants through the whole process from planning a website to maximising its impact once live, and giving them practical tips that could be implemented straight away.

We spent time on Zoom with the owner of a holiday park, navigating through the company’s website together, and making suggestions, during the call, for easy-to-fix improvements in areas such as navigation.

We held a detailed, one-to-one Zoom session with a County Durham museum, sharing our observations on both its bricks-and-mortar and online retail offers.

Though much of what the museum was doing was already excellent, we were able to suggest improvements to the website’s product categories, WooCommerce settings, product descriptions, quality of images, and the prominence of important shipping information. For ease of implementation, we summarised the key points in a follow-up email after the session.

In particular, we encouraged the museum to think further about how the online and bricks-and-mortar stores might support and drive traffic to each other – for example, by taking product photographs within the distinctive and beautiful museum setting, and adopting instore messaging along the lines of “If you love this item, you can buy it again from our online shop”.

Can we help?

If you are a County Durham tourism business, there is still time to benefit from this funded business support.

Elsewhere, businesses and organisations across the UK regularly benefit from our practical and proven webinars and Website MOTs.

Sometimes we deliver them directly as CannyInsights.com, or other times we join up with trusted partners like Avenue Six, with whom we can pool our expertise as part of a larger collaborative project.

If you think our input can be useful to you, please do drop us a message.