How The Retail Practice and Unmissable England helped strengthen the Cotswolds visitor economy through a practical, insight-led training programme.
In 2025, Cotswold Tourism (the region’s DMO) invited The Retail Practice to partner with Unmissable England on a new business support initiative: Helping Businesses Market Themselves. This marked our first formal collaboration with Unmissable England, extending The Retail Practice’s work supporting the visitor and hospitality sector.
The challenge was clear: while the Cotswolds is home to outstanding tourism businesses, many struggled to articulate why their offer appealed to specific visitor markets. Websites often said “great for families” or “walkers welcome” without actually demonstrating it. Businesses needed practical guidance, not theory, and a way to view themselves through the eyes of their ideal customer.
Together with Unmissable England founder Chris Brant, we designed and delivered a complete programme of training, tools, and marketing resources to help businesses communicate more clearly, confidently, and commercially.
The programme was built around five workshops, blending customer insight, digital marketing principles, and real-world tourism experience. All content was designed to be practical and immediately actionable, with recordings and downloadable templates provided to every participant.
Ahead of the workshops, the DMO issued a short diagnostic survey to help businesses reflect on their current and desired customer base. This created a baseline understanding and allowed us to tailor the sessions.
A high-energy foundation session delivered live via webinar
This opening session helped businesses understand why market alignment matters, unpacking how visitors make decisions and what they look for when choosing places to stay, eat, or explore. We guided participants through how to view their websites and social channels as “shop windows”, making sure they clearly communicated the right messages to the right audiences.
Topics included:
This session also acted as a teaser for the deeper-dive workshops that followed.
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Each focused webinar unpacked one of the Cotswolds’ priority visitor markets, giving businesses practical tools to tailor their offer and online presence.
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Every participant received:
These materials were created to ensure businesses could continue refining their marketing long after the programme ended.
The programme equipped Cotswolds businesses with:
Most importantly, it helped the DMO strengthen the region’s visitor economy by raising the overall standard of how businesses present themselves online.
This project marked our first collaboration with Unmissable England, combining:
Together, we delivered a programme that was both strategic and deeply grounded in the realities of running a small visitor business, exactly what the DMO was looking for.
The success of the Cotswolds programme has created a blueprint for supporting other rural and regional tourism organisations. The workshops, and the practical, empathetic approach behind them, are now being adapted for other visitor destinations across the UK.
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