The timing for the Yorkshire start of the Tour de France 2014 could not have been sweeter with the second consecutive UK winner at the week-end. With the Le Grand Depart scheduled for 5 and 6 July 2014, the promotional agency Welcome to Yorkshire has ambitious recruitment and marketing plans for the year ahead.
The agency’s head of communications, Dee Marshall, told Prolific North that they were anticipating an official statement tomorrow which they were hoping would include details of the first announcement of central Government funding allocation for Le Tour Yorkshire.
To date, most of the work preparing the year-long promotional campaign has been handled within Welcome to Yorkshire but should the funding allocation indeed materialise, Marshall said the scale of the campaign would certainly take on a whole new and much more ambitious shape.
The dedicated website has been created by designer Will Hodgson with all digital activity led by Pete Wilson and Tom Ashurst.
The recently released newsletter, Allez Yorkshire, now has over 40,000 subscribers with an extraordinary open rate of over 50% claimed Marshall.
There are circa 2,500 Facebook likes with Twitter followers now over 20,000.
Marshall said that early on, the agency had decided it would focus heavily on film as content for the site, a move she said that had gone down well with the Tour’s organisers who were delighted with the film content they had produced to date.
Film for the site has been primarily commissioned from Roger Keech Productions in Leeds.
Media buying for Welcome to Yorkshire is handled both internally and by Carat Manchester.
Cheshire agency Cirrus is the current retained creative agency.
A submission by Cirrus and Welcome to Yorkshire won the Tourism & Leisure Campaign of the Year category at the Northern Marketing Awards in July.
