Setting out on my own at free walking tours of Edinburgh might have seemed a fool’s errand. Many of my colleagues in a group chat compared it to Brexit. After all, I had been working for another company which was well-established and was bringing in the people. They were charging a marketing fee and taking care of a lot of the stress of trying to find people. Why was I willing to rock the boat ? What experience did I have in marketing? Well, it was quite a complicated situation. I’m driven by my own ambition to be my own person, do my own thing, and provide for my family and those I care about. It’s not long in so far, but the bookings have been coming, the reviews are starting. This poster is the next step and today I want to tell you a bit about how at first I failed, but then have succeeded to make something I’m happy with.
So let’s explore together.
A discussion: does physical marketing work for free walking tours?
On the surface, it seems like Part 2 in the fool’s errand that is my attempt to start something new. After all, when I was doing my charity tour back in December I printed a number of posters and flyers and the guests driven by this was in the single digits. When I just set up, I had a talk with another who had done similar in the past.
He told me that since starting he had paid close to ten thousand pounds on flyers and had maybe made one hundred pounds back. The numbers were in and I considered that that was probably a good enough reason why not to pursue flyers as a major driver of traffic.
But I have had a reconsideration after talking to some hostel staff. Posters are a good alternative to flyers. People receive a flyer, look at it for a second, and discard it. But posters can go up in businesses and can stay there for weeks or even months. They can get hundreds of eyeballs. Will that drive any sort of traffic? Potentially.
Digital marketing versus traditional marketing
In the modern world, digital marketing is absolutely the right way to go. People buy things online. They get recommendations online. Guests do research online. The biggest thing would be therefore to get online and try and push things. Possibly paying something to help me to rank, maybe buying some adverts.
That is an idea and that is all in the pipeline. My idea though is that traditional marketing has some advantages digital doesn’t. For one thing, traditional marketing with posters, flyers, conversations, is straight to potential guests. I am straight up asking them what their needs are in terms of a guide and offering to fulfil them. The cost might be high and the return may be lower at a certain extent, but for a new venture which needs more reviews and more bookings to give it more credibility, finding the people who are already here and interested is a way to improve digital marketing anyway.
Drawing others in is the way to enhance the process.
First Drafts
It’s probably not great form to reveal first drafts of adverts but I think it’s illustrative for some of the choices made.
This was the initial draft which we showed to a number of artistic types, those with a design background, as well as others who give free walking tours.
I talked to 15 people which is probably too many. But it did garner a lot of different views. Overall 3 were complete positive, and the rest had a lot of truly valuable feedback that I will carry with me always. But feedback is a gift, it can be accepted or rejected, so some ideas did not make the cut. Mostly due to different design philosophies.
There was a fair agreement among many I’d asked that the colour was okay but should pop more. This is why we decided a darker background was better to bring out the writing. Someone I trust deeply who’s in marketing told me to swap the tours and the ‘essential guide’ lines round so that ‘essential guide’ could be a tagline, and the ‘Free/Pay What You Want Walking Tours’ line could then let me remove the word ‘tours’ from every item on the list. This opens up more of the space there and aids separation between items, which was some of the other feedback I’d received. I decided to remove ‘history’ because though the tours do have a fair bit of history to them, I wanted to be more inclusive and to some ‘history’ feels a little elite at times. This also let me move around the writing so that the word ‘Edinburgh’ was in the centre. Then, I added that fun little arrow pointing to the QR code. ‘Book here to avoid disappointment’. It’s a fun little line that’s sort of jokey and threatening at the same time.
The colour shift to dark blue happened after printing a couple different versions. The original violet was too light. We figured the dark blue also looks sort of like Irn-Bru.
What did the initial failure teach?
The initial failure of the design helped me to understand how to design in the first place. We used Canva. It is a surprisingly easy and fun tool to use which lets you create simple designs like the one chosen.
The initial failure also taught me that every now and then I’d get feedback that I disagreed with in some way. It was on me to figure out how to use this rather than let it paralyse me with indecision, which can be a flaw on mine. The important thing was to keep track of the design philosophy.
Design philosophy
The basic idea I have for creations like this is DIY. Do It Yourself. This was a huge part of punk aesthetics. Punks did not necessarily have lots of money to publish magazines and hire graphic design teams. Instead, they used what they had available. They cut words from existing items and pasted it to paper to write articles. They got pictures from magazines and edited them heavily. Putting together their own publications (zines) and making simple posters to advertise shows.
With the invention of the internet that is now more possible than ever. With the recent improvements in AI it has become absolute child’s play to make professional looking images with only a little prompt. That is not how we want to do things here at Edinburgh Street Historians. We want it human, authentic, and real. Therefore, we’ve used good tools that can be easily acquired but no AI as that is not something we use in our guest facing materials.
The whole thing might be a mistake which later on will need to be fixed, but it’s my potential mistake, and that is liberating in its way.
The writer of this piece is drinking Bovril which he also made himself.
How do you book one of these famous walking tours? Book here to avoid disappointment.
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