Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.

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Competition ends on 5th February 2025. The winner will be contacted via Bluesky.

Show references:

Website: https://www.agility-marketing.co.uk/

https://www.agility-marketing.co.uk/service/digital-advertising-survey/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-dimes-agility/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitaagility/

Liz Dimes is a Digital Marketing Director for visitor attraction specialist, Agility Marketing and the lead behind their digital advertising and conversion optimisation strategies. She boasts over a decade of experience in delivering tangible results. With a relentless drive for results she has steered impressive returns for clients across the attraction industry.

Anita Waddell is MD and founder of Agility Marketing, visitor attraction marketing specialists. Anita has been a Visit England judge, currently sits on the BALPPA Management Committee and looked after the National Farm Attraction Network during Covid.

Anita fell in love with the sector during her first ever marketing role at London Zoo. Having always worked in the attraction sector, she founded Agility at the start of the millennium. In total, across her career she has worked with over 70 attractions.

With a passion for digital and data driven marketing, she adores seeing clients get results and enjoys mentoring her team to deliver winning campaigns.

Transcription:

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. For many regional attractions, the Head of Marketing is a one person marketing machine expected to be all over digital, email, social and out of home advertising.

In today's episode we're joined by Anita Waddell and Liz Dimes from Agility Marketing who'll be sharing insights from their attraction marketing academy to help power up your marketing in 2025. After starting her career in attractions marketing at London Zoo, Anita has run Agility Marketing for over years, working with clients like Camel Creek and Blackgang Chine.

Liz is the expert behind Agility Marketing's digital advertising and conversion optimization strategies, having found her love for visitor attractions when joining Agility in 2017.

Paul Marden: Liz, Anita, welcome. Skip the Queue.

Anita Waddell: Thank you.

Liz Dimes: Great to be here.

Paul Marden: So this is not our first episode of the new year, but it's the first episode we're recording in the new year. And as I was saying before we started, my rule is that I can still say Happy New Year up until the end of January as long as it's the first time I've said Happy New Year to somebody. So Happy New Year to both of you.

Liz Dimes: Happy New Year to you.

Anita Waddell: Happy New Year.

Paul Marden: As you know, we always get started with an icebreaker question. So I've got a couple of little icebreakers for you and they are topical, relevant to where we are right now. So I'm going to go with Liz. Which is better, Christmas Day or New Year's Day?

Liz Dimes: Christmas Day. Although I must admit I prefer the run up to Christmas than the actual day.

Paul Marden: Oh, okay. So it's the excitement of going out and doing all the prep and the present wrapping and yeah.

Liz Dimes: Christmas trees, pretty lights, shiny things. Excitement. But yes, I think I'd definitely choose Christmas Day over New Year's Day.

Paul Marden: It's funny, isn't it? Because we'll split. I'm definitely Christmas. Much more Christmas than New Year's. I'm quite happy on New Year's to be sat watching hootenanny on telly while I'm going out and doing a big go out and party with lots of people.

Liz Dimes: But absolutely, I agree.

Paul Marden: my age, but there we go. Anita, do you chuckle the Christmas decorations and the lights into a box and throw it into the loft or are you Ms. Neat and everything is neatly folded and packaged away ready for future Anita to thank you and be able to do everything easily next week?

Anita Waddell: I would love to say I was the latter, but having done that on Sunday, I think it's more about getting them away in a box and deal with the problem next year. So, yes, so, yeah, I aspire to be the neat queen, but unfortunately it is just, yeah, time takes its toll and it's a matter of getting the job done.

Paul Marden: There's a real spread in our house. Mrs. Marden is tidy it away as fast as you can. I will sit there literally for hours straightening all of the out and making sure that it's right. And then next year you can figure out who was responsible for the packing away because you could just see it straight in front of you.

Liz Dimes: I saw a recommendation the other day, actually, that you should put sort of £20 or something in with your Christmas decorations so when you get them out next year, you can buy yourself a takeaway while you're sorting them out from last year's. You. I didn't do it, but I thought that was a brilliant idea.

Paul Marden: So I came back to work on Monday and I went. All the stuff from the office was all packed away and I went to put it in the storage locker and we share our storage with the building owners and I just found the Christmas tree stuck in the cupboard fully decorated and I think, is that really putting the decorations? Is that really taking it down? Have you broken the rules or is ihat really a cunning plan?

Anita Waddell: That's one way of doing with it, isn't it? Definitely.

Paul Marden: Exactly. Look, we have got lots to talk about, but first tell me about yourselves and tell me about your background. Anita, tell me a little bit about you.

Anita Waddell: I suppose visitor attractions has always been my thing, ever since my first marketing job, which was at London Zoo many years ago, I caught the bug really. But I suppose I was at London Zoo. I was very. They weren't in the strong financial situation, so there was actually a recruitment ban. So I was a young aspiring marketeer who joined the company. And as everybody who was experienced and worried about their own career path left, I just absorbed their role. So over the spate of three years I had a huge amount of experience and from there then left to become a marketing manager of a much smaller attraction.

Anita Waddell: And having doubled their numbers from, you know, up to over 200, 000 over a year, I suddenly thought, hold on a minute, I actually, this is really fun industry and something that's actually, I can do okay. So from there I went on and ended up working for an agency myself who were specialists in visitor attractions. And then 20 years ago I thought, “Well, hold on a minute, maybe I should try this for myself. Maybe I can have my own agency.” I thought, “What's the worst that can happen?” I just have to go back and do the day job again. So over those years more people have joined me. I've got three cracking directors, really good senior leadership team and Agility now is a visitor attraction marketing agency.

Paul Marden: Amazing. How about you, Liz, how did you get into this industry?

Liz Dimes: Well, I started in a very different interest. I did an automotive and I started doing more PR than marketing definitely, but it just wasn't. I enjoyed it a lot and I learned a lot about cars but it wasn't really my passion so I sort of left and thought I'm going to try something else. I was more interested in learning about the digital marketing as that was really starting to kick off in the world at that point. So I got a digital marketing role at a business school which was near to where I live, which is very different. And I really started to get the bug for the digital marketing aspect and just in general enjoyed learning more and more and more about that.

Liz Dimes: But the whole sort of B2B business school side, little bit dull for me if I'm totally honest. So. And...