Ballina -- why can't it market itself well?

monument

There's some people doing great working trying to market Ballina -- there's some good examples of social media output and some great examples of design output, but it's incoherent in that way Ballina.ie is offline at the moment and how it's spread across two identities (Ballina.ie and northmayo.ie). Anybody involved please read this post as born out of frustration looking at potential lost...

It's St Patrick's Day, people might have recently been looking for info about a long weekend away and others will be looking ahead to the summer, however Ballina.ie just has the following on it's home page:



That's it. Not even a link the Ballina.ie Facebook page which at least does have some info on the Patrick's day events, which is what I had been looking for.

I had looked at this in the past and was even on the border of setting up a static website to highlight the best of the area, how to get here, where to stay etc. Then the Ballina.ie website seemed to be updated again, but now it's fully off line heading into tourist season.

There's also two other which have info on the area: The North Mayo at http://www.northmayo.ie/ is far too image heavy and lacks info such as activity maps and even addresses in some cases. It also has no info on St Patrick's Day and there's items miss categorised showing up on the homepage (accommodation in a thing to do slot). Social media links are buried. That's not all of the issues, but that's enough to highlight the main issues.

There's also http://www.mayo-ireland.ie/ -- but that also has little detail.

Westport's http://www.destinationwestport.com/ or Newport's http://www.newportmayo.ie/ websites are both good templates.

What's the issue in Ballina? Lack of understanding of online marketing an area? Businesses not coming together or not getting along? Or does somebody in charge think that taking a tourism website off line like this is acceptable?

I'm not posting this to have a go at anybody, it's just a disappointment to see an area with such great potential to marketed poorly. Getting extra tourism development and extra funding is always great, but one of Ballina's most weak spots is highlighting what it already has.

The_Honeybadger

This is a common problem across the country and not confined to ballina. It's mainly a resource problem, and also voluntary committees formed to promote tourism lacking even a basic understanding of digital marketing and its importance in this day and age.

Failte irl do a great job of promoting the main tourism hubs, but rural areas need to do it for themselves. The main issues are that effective tourism marketing is expensive and time consuming. To run a really good website and active social media pages you are looking at 15-20 hours per week minimum. The person doing the work would need to be skilled, meaning it is difficult to use ce schemes or tus participants without significant investment in training. Added to this is all the initial research and development that goes into a really good website and you are talking about a big investment. Most tourism development committees don't know how to put something like this together, and probably lack the money to do so in any case.

The result is you get cobbled together websites and printed material, sporadic posting on social media and a generally poor standard of promotion. In certain areas the local authority step in and do a reasonable job, or you can get a small bunch of committed individuals who will drive it forward. This is the exception rather than the rule though unfortunately.

finisklin

As per the previous poster, responsibilities are divided between Failte Ireland and Mayo county Council. Plus resources are a lot thinner than back in the good old days. There is an expertise in digital media that is scarce in the west and certainly it's not in Mayo co co!

That being said when they outsource it and put money behind it, it works.

There was a proposal in the town council 12-18 months back about hiring a marketing consultant. This may have been done and carried out by Moy Valley resources. Can't be sure though.

What is clear is that the town is less hands on than other towns in the county such as Westport. That really has a high standard for all stakeholders (public and private) that pulls together and markets itself superbly. The hospitality sector is a big part of that and Ballina's is not well developed.

Brand Ballina is evolving quickly and the various elements of the jig saw are being pulled together - monasteries of the moy, Mary Robinson centre and the JCC. It's not clear what the strategy is and how that's being resourced. This really is the issue as some of these were never planned as part of the towns strategy e.g. JCC.

The question is how are they being stitched together?