Farm tourism would appear to be moving on apace as a new strand to tourism in the North East, according to recent announcements from regional development agency One North East and also organisations in various counties within North East England.

This is great news for the North East tourism industry, if it maximises the benefits of farm tourism and really supports those farms that decide to diversify into tourism in order to earn a vital second income.

Having handled PR for the North West Farm Tourism Initiative for two years, Catapult PR knows the impact that farm tourism can have on the rural community.  It has helped all sorts of farm tourism businesses grow, whether they took the decision to open a farm shop, create new farm accommodation, open up a visitor attraction such as a maize maze, animal park, or even firefighting experience, or build a tea shop.

The power of cluster group marketing within farm tourism cannot be ignored. We launched or worked with three cluster groups through our PR campaign - Luxury in a Farm, The Natural Producers and Tea Trail Cumbria.  All three captured the imagination of the media, generating extensive coverage and leading to our farm tourism PR campaign being a national CIPR Excellence Award runner-up within the category of Consumer Relations in the Arts, Sport, Tourism and Leisure sector.

The whole North West Farm Tourism Initiative project, so ably managed by Katie Read - now our client once again - should act as a beacon of best practice within farm tourism.  Many successful enterprises were launched, providing new avenues for income for many farms.  

The PR for NWFTI repositioned farm tourism and ensured it was no longer positioned as something taking place in muddy, wet, smelly farmyards.  It created a desire to holiday on a farm, taste farm food and indulge in activities on and around the farm.  It attracted new holidaymakers from new parts of the country, who longed to get in touch with nature.  It was a crying shame that funding had to end in 2007.

The power of PR in supporting this campaign is best judged after the event.  Now, the farms that received such profile at the time have slipped out of the media arena and are seldom to be found making national headlines.  For Catapult, this is upsetting, which is why we created a special product that could allow farms to still receive some support.  

Shacklabank Walking Holidays took up this option and continue to make national and regional headlines as a result.  Others who felt they could go it alone with their marketing have no longer been able to capture share of voice within the media.

Both Katie Read and the Catapult team will be interested to see how farm tourism develops in North East England. Our approach was very much living and breathing farm tourism, engaging with the farms on a one to one basis and understanding their issues and needs.  

Backing this with a hugely creative PR campaign that really made media sit up and take notice of holidays on farms was another big reason for the marketing success.  Our reward came in hearing about bookings, sales, numbers through turnstiles and cash in the tills.  We loved seeing a North West farm named as one of the five best spas in the world and seeing our news make an impact worldwide.

We have a huge bank of knowledge on farm tourism to share and hope that we might receive a call from any farm tourism or rural development officer wishing to make rural development take off and succeed in the way that it did in the North West. 

The rural tourism product is not always understood by the consumer or the media, but we have proven that we know how to ignite interest in it.  We must hope the phone rings, so that those North East farms receiving funding for tourism and rural development really reap the benefits.