August 14th, 2026
The Need for Storytelling Heritage PR and Content
How do you make a heritage visitor attraction, with a strong back story, appear attractive to today’s UK visitor? The answer, as we our heritage PR and content team has categorically proved here at Catapult PR, is to max out the potential of the story and find the means to bring it to life in hugely creative ways.
We have long done this as an agency that has one of its specialisms in the heritage PR sector. We have brought many a story to life, whether that has been through creating our own kids history booklet for Langley Castle in Northumberland, launching a genealogical search for the elusive founder of the world’s oldest topiary garden, or creating a Heritage Past-port with amazing resumes of the attractions within a heritage cluster group in Cumbria.
Natural heritage PR and content storytellers
We are actually natural storytellers, and assumed that role long before the PR sector even began to talk about storytelling and made it fashionable. Maybe it’s a degree in history that helps. Perhaps it’s just an inquisitiveness about the past and all the romanticism and realism that this can uncover. Maybe it’s because it makes PR and content writing more exciting for us, knowing that it creates a stronger magnet for both journalists and visitors.
But now we have even more solid evidence that PR and content storytelling is what the heritage visitor wants. They’re done with heritage attractions trying to be classic car backdrops or places for outdoor cinema. They want you, as a heritage visitor attraction, to be true to yourself. They want your story and they want it delivered in an authentic and engaging way. We are living in a memory-creating society and heritage attractions simply have to play the game and help forge those memories through their storytelling.
Heritage visitor attraction white paper
We know this because we have once again commissioned independent research in the UK, to get inside the heads of the heritage and cultural visitor. This time, however, we have turned the findings into a white paper. Why? Well, we believe that there are aspects that cannot be ignored by heritage visitor attractions and their PR and marketing teams, either here or in those countries that the UK visitor may head to. By creating a heritage white paper, we want to try to underline that the time to get your marketing to the heritage visitor right is right now. Generational shifts in thinking – coupled with AI-driven search – demands it. It doesn’t matter whether you are a stately home or garden, historic or literary house, museum or heritage railway. Fail to recognise what the visitor to a historic or cultural attraction wants from your heritage PR, content and other marketing and you could fail.
What the heritage visitor wants to get from a historic visitor attraction
So where does historic and heritage storytelling come in to this? This is actually easy to see. When we asked average Brits what matters most to them when visiting a paid heritage attraction (bearing in mind that some are free), we found that, as expected, admission price came top and value for money second. However, “a unique historical story” came third, of importance to over a fifth (21%). If you then marry this up with the 10th most important factor – “the availability of good storytelling tour guides” (9.4%), you begin to see how important the conveying of the story actually is to people.
In other words, people want to live and breathe the story that unfolded within the walls or space they are visiting. They want to visualise what happened there, at some point in history. They want to derive added value from storytelling. It’s more important to them than children’s activities, free car parking, wellbeing experiences, picnicking and many more things. No matter how many Shakespeare plays in the garden you put on, the Bard’s tales will not be as important to visitors as your own story. In fact, in an open question on our independently run survey, respondents actually named ‘costumed storytelling actors’ as a big plus when planning where to visit.
Poor PR and storytelling by UK historic attractions
But when the Catapult PR team here then commissioned a second independent survey, we found that 7% of those people who know something about heritage visits said that UK heritage visitor attractions put little effort into storytelling and visitor interpretation. This rises to almost 10% of men felling this way and over 13% of people in Greater London.
11% of people also said that visitor attractions should do their own version of ‘unboxing’, by offering behind-the-scenes insights. What is notable is that this rose to over a fifth of those aged 35-44 (21.25%) and 18% of 25-34s. How can you do this unboxing? Well, through good PR and online storytelling about what it takes to run your visitor experience.
Around 11% of respondents also said they would be more inclined to visit a heritage attraction that offered a guided tour. Notably, however, audio tours were a real no-no for visitors. Visitors want that in-person connection; that ‘from the horse’s mouth’ type approach.
Storytelling as a conduit to a connection with the past
Our surveys, and resulting white paper, show that visitors see storytelling as the conduit to a connection with the past but want this storytelling done very well. This could be through unique events which bring the story to life, but visitors are not keen on generic events, which they see as having little relevance to the venue’s unique story. (Back to the Shakespeare events then, unless you are located at his birthplace!)
As we know from previous surveys that we have conducted, there is a desire for the visitor to start to receive that storytelling pre-visit – via blogs and downloads on websites, which convey some of the venue’s story, even if just in snippets, Yet, as we also know as a specialist in heritage PR and travel PR, so few visitor attractions and heritage visitor attractions pay any attention to that. Their online storytelling is typically very poor.
Why heritage visitor attractions need to build AI search authority
In our AI search-driven world, that needs to change quickly. Heritage visitor attractions, whether stately homes and gardens, museums, historic sites or heritage railways, will only stay visible by building their authority. Too many associate that (if they think about it at all), with businesses offering professional or financial services, or consultancy in some field. They fail to see that it’s absolutely true of travel and heritage businesses nowadays too. Tourism venues need to compete for attention by developing the right messaging.
To achieve this goal will entail high-impact PR externally, married up with compelling online content on their owned channel – their website. Then supplementing this with social media posts, becomes the cherry on top of the cake.
Summing up the heritage storytelling argument
What our white paper, which you can download here, tells us, however, is that the PR and the compelling content both need to be vehicles for telling the story in a dynamic, engaging and exciting way. The visitor does not want dry and stale and ‘as you might expect’. Find new approaches, ignite their interest and hook them in with a few opening lines and you will become the heritage visitor attraction equivalent of the book they can’t put down. The natural compulsion, if that is the case, is to visit. Pay no attention to the need to stand out through your storytelling and innovative ways of bringing it to life and you will not be providing the ‘why’ that heritage visitors need to have.
For help with your heritage PR and storytelling, contact me at jane@catapultpr.co.uk and let’s get those stories projected into the imaginations of your target visitors.
By Jane Hunt, heritage PR and content specialist at Catapult PR.
Biography: Jane Hunt studied for a history degree at New Hall College (now Murray Edwards), Cambridge University, before starting a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, into the expansion of Europe and Indian history. In her PR career, she has promoted a large number of heritage visitor attractions, or venues with strong historical links, with this dovetailing with a focus on UK and European travel and tourism PR. Jane has won a large number of awards for campaigns conducted for heritage venues and continues to create some of the most dynamic storytelling-led approaches in her field.
