Marketing Quesnel as a “destination” community

Courtesy of the City of Quesnel:

Editor's Note -- this week's Quesnel City Council column is written by Quesnel Mayor Bob Simpson.  He can be reached via email here

At a recent Council meeting, staff presented the City’s new marketing materials and gave Council a comprehensive overview of all of the new marketing initiatives we currently have underway. The new materials look great and really present Quesnel well in all mediums, particularly online with our new videos. Some of these videos were shown during the broadcast of the BC Curling Championships and were very well received by residents and visitors alike.

During the staff presentation to Council, one Councillor asked why Barkerville and Bowron and other destination locations were not mentioned in the materials. The answer is simple: Quesnel is finally marketing itself as a destination people should consider coming to as visitors, residents, and investors, independent of all of the other great reasons to come to the region in general.

While Quesnel will continue to promote Barkerville, Bowron and other North Cariboo locations as part of our Tourism marketing, the City finally has colorful, modern, interesting, and fun marketing materials that promote what the City itself has to offer visitors and residents. These materials highlight our local trails (including an updated trail map), “doggy destinations” (both off leash and on leash), our many parks and playgrounds, our heritage assets, and our many indoor amenities.

All the new marketing materials are in our new brand colours (which are awesome) and follow our brand guidelines for communicating with the general public (conversational, upbeat, and fun). As we develop our mountain bike trail systems and our riverfronts, and as we add to our already broad suite of sports and cultural amenities, we will add these to our marketing materials to ensure people are made aware of all that Quesnel has to offer to all ages and all interests.

Like our rebranding initiative and the comprehensive updating of the City’s website and social media, the majority of the costs associated with the development of these new marketing materials was covered by grant money. In particular, we were successful in obtaining a Rural Dividend grant for a two-year community marketing initiative and we’ve taken full advantage of the marketing grants available through the Northern Trust.

The materials staff have developed will be distributed and broadcast widely as part of a comprehensive and targeted marketing strategy that was developed with the assistance of expert advice from one of BC’s leading marketing firms. So, don’t be surprised when you start to see our material popping up in various mediums over the coming months, including Global TV later this year.

While some in our community feel that Quesnel can never be a destination and that we’re wasting our time and taxpayer money promoting the community as such, this negative assessment of our community is simply not reflected in the feedback we continually receive from new residents and from visitors. For example, the feedback we got from hosting the BC Curling Championships was overwhelmingly positive and Curl BC is keen to host another one of their events here in the near future. But, this did not come as a surprise, as we have been getting similar feedback from other conferences and tournaments we’ve hosted over the past couple of years.

Quesnel is a great community located in a particularly beautiful part of our province. We have much to be proud of and much to promote. It’s great to have new marketing materials that finally capture the great things about our community and communicate them in a way that will entice others to come and enjoy what we sometimes take for granted.