Discover Cotswolds is a guide to the Cotswolds. We have an engaged and growing audience on social media, with Instagram as our primary channel, and a website with thousands of visits per month, offering town and village guides for people planning a trip to the region. If you run somewhere people come to the Cotswolds for, a hotel or inn, a house or garden open to visitors, an attraction, we’d love to work with you.
Who you would be reaching
On Instagram more than 40% of our followers are over 45, and the biggest single group is 55 to 64. Two thirds are women. These are people who potentially book midweek, travel off-season, and are looking for an overnight stay, not just a couple of hours somewhere.
We have a diverse international audience. Around a third are in the UK, a fifth in the United States, and the rest spread across Italy, Germany, Australia and further afield. The over-55 demographic makes up nearly a quarter of everyone who comes to Britain from abroad, and a third of American visitors. Roughly a fifth of our following is American. When someone in Boston or Milan is working out where to base themselves in the Cotswolds, this is one of the places they look.
Our guide pages rank in Google for the towns and villages people search for when they’re planning, so our reach isn’t just on social media.
What a partnership is
A partnership is a permanent, clearly marked feature for your business on the guide page people already read for your town or village. Run an inn in Shipton under Wychwood and your feature sits on the Shipton page, with a proper write-up and a direct link to you. It stays there, and it renews each year.
Two benefits that might not be immediately obvious are worth mentioning.
The first is that we take the Google ads off any page that has a partner listing. That means your feature isn’t sitting in a row of adverts, some of which might be a competitor’s. The page works for you and for nobody else.
The second is that the link goes directly to you. Currently many of the links on our site send people via affiliate relationships to various aggregators, so the traffic we send earns commission for them (and us) rather than coming straight to you. A partnership changes that.
What we don’t sell
We don’t sell editorial. The write-ups, the recommendations, the choice of what goes where, none of that is for sale, and it stays that way. That independence is the reason the guide is worth reading, and the reason a place on it is worth having. What you’re buying is a guaranteed, permanent presence on a page people trust, marked as a partner, not a favourable review you paid for.
Instagram partnerships
We can also feature a partner on Instagram, to our audience.
A paid post has to be labelled as a partnership, an ad or a PR visit. Labelled posts tend to reach fewer people than standard organic ones. So we’d quote a social feature on its own terms rather than promise you the numbers a normal post gets.
A feature works on the strength of the content, not just the size of the account posting it. A weak photograph won’t travel however many people see it, and it won’t do anything for you. We know these places and we know what this audience responds to. We are happy to produce the content if yours isn’t strong enough, and that is quoted separately. If you have your own material we’re happy to use it, as long as it’s strong enough to earn its place. We also publish to Facebook and TikTok, and a partner feature goes out there too.
What this looks like in practice
We feature the kinds of places our audience is interested in, and they turn up for it. The guide pages pull steady search traffic from people planning a trip, and our social posts reach a wide audience on top of that. If you want to talk about working together, we can share the relevant data for the pages or types of post where you would feature.
Here’s a link to our downloadable media pack.
Get in touch
If you’d like to talk about a partnership, use the contact form below and tell us a bit about your business. We’ll come back with what we’d suggest and what it would cost.