Make Christmas Count: Bespoke Destination Marketing Strategies Built for Growth

Christmas is one of the biggest opportunities in the destination marketing calendar.

For shopping centres, tourist attractions, leisure destinations, retail parks and visitor destinations, the festive period brings increased competition for attention, changing consumer behaviours and a relatively short window in which to turn awareness into meaningful results.

That is why, for OnBrand, a successful Christmas campaign starts with more than a creative idea. It starts with a strategy built around growth, footfall, engagement and, where relevant, ticket sales.

With more than 25 years of marketing experience and a specialist team working across destinations throughout the UK, we help our clients build bespoke Christmas strategies designed around their individual audiences, commercial objectives and catchment areas.

Christmas campaigns built around your destination

No two destinations are the same, and their Christmas marketing strategies should not be either.

A shopping centre looking to increase festive footfall has very different objectives to a ticketed Christmas attraction. A leisure destination may be focused on increasing dwell time and repeat visits, while a visitor attraction may need to drive advance ticket sales across a defined booking period.

Our role is to understand those objectives and create a marketing strategy specifically around them.

Today, OnBrand works with destinations spanning shopping centres, retail and leisure schemes, tourist attractions, visitor destinations and mixed-use environments via their dedicated destination marketing division, giving our team a broad understanding of the different challenges involved in driving visits during one of the busiest periods of the year.

Whether the objective is increasing awareness of a Christmas programme, launching a new festive attraction, generating ticket sales or giving audiences another reason to visit, we develop campaigns with measurable outcomes at their core.

Reaching the audiences most likely to visit

One of the biggest areas of focus for our Christmas strategies is catchment.

We are currently seeing an influx of enquiries from destinations looking for more sophisticated ways to reach audiences within both their primary and secondary catchment areas, particularly as competition for Christmas visits continues to increase.

Rather than simply putting a campaign in the market and hoping it reaches the right people, we build strategies around where potential visitors are located, how far they are realistically prepared to travel and which messages are most likely to influence their decision.

That can mean developing different approaches for audiences living immediately around a destination versus those further afield who may need a stronger reason to make the journey.

Through a combination of paid media, organic social, digital content, PR, email marketing, community engagement and wider campaign activity, we create joined-up strategies designed to build awareness and move audiences towards action.

From awareness to footfall and ticket sales

Christmas marketing can generate impressive reach and engagement, but ultimately the metrics that matter most are those connected to the destination’s commercial objectives.

For many of our clients, that means footfall.

For others, particularly attractions and ticketed events, the priority is ticket sales and conversion.

Our Christmas strategies are therefore built around the full customer journey. We look at how someone first discovers the destination, what makes them interested, what information they need before making a decision and what will ultimately persuade them to visit or book.

It is an approach that combines creativity with performance.

Strong creativity gets people to notice the campaign. Strong strategy gives them a reason to act.

A full-service destination marketing partner

One of the advantages of working with OnBrand is that your Christmas strategy does not need to sit across multiple disconnected agencies.

Our destination marketing team brings together strategy, creative, digital marketing, social media, video content, paid media, PR, email, community engagement, data capture and campaign reporting.

That means we can look at the entire campaign rather than individual channels in isolation.

From the initial proposition and campaign concept through to media planning, content creation, launch, optimisation and reporting, we can provide a complete marketing solution tailored around your destination.

And because our team specialises in destination marketing, every recommendation is made with the same question in mind:

How will this help drive more people to visit?

Planning Christmas 2026?

The strongest Christmas campaigns are rarely those that begin a few weeks before launch.

They are built around a clear proposition, a defined audience, an understanding of the catchment and a marketing plan that gives the campaign enough time to build momentum.

With destinations already starting conversations with us about their Christmas 2026 strategies, now is the time to begin planning how your festive campaign can work harder.

Whether you are launching a new Christmas attraction, looking to increase footfall, aiming to grow ticket sales or simply want a more strategic approach to reaching audiences across your catchment, OnBrand can help.

Looking for a bespoke Christmas marketing strategy for your destination?

Talk to our Destination Marketing team about how we can build a campaign around your objectives, your audiences and the results you want to achieve this Christmas.

[email protected]

03333 220022