I’m part of the Visit Knowle marketing team, and recently, spirits have been high in the Visit Knowle camp. Over the last two months, we’ve been encouraging local businesses to join the conversation, post more and comment more on social media, and now we are starting to see the results of our hard work. So much so, that the team have been doing ‘happy dances’ in their kitchens all week.
Why engage in place marketing?
Many customers want to shop local, and there is a role for places to invite visitors to come to their town or village, alongside shops, restaurants and businesses inviting customers to their premises. If we combine our voices and talk about both the individual businesses and the place, then we’re working together, encouraging visitors to browse in a place for longer. By working with each other and engaging in each others posts, we’re also introducing our followers to neighbouring businesses we think they’ll be interested in.
Engagement in Knowle is growing
We’ve been watching the engagement graph for Knowle turn upwards and we’re pleased to see that August and September engagement figures in Knowle are greater than the previous two months.
Even better, we’re now seeing more comments on our own posts from businesses that we weren’t hearing from before and we’re starting to see them comment on their neighbours posts too. We know it’s just the start, and that we’ve got a long way to go yet, but we like to celebrate success.
What we’ve done to get there
- We’ve been deliberately creating posts that invite businesses to comment
- We’ve deliberately been creating posts that businesses can share (and given example content on how they can share our posts to their advantage)
- We’ve shared lots of good news stories
- We’ve role modeled how to be social on social – commenting (lots) on local businesses posts, especially on Instagram
- We’ve run a few stories and posts about joining the local conversation
- We’ve run a “best post in place” post weekly, not only featuring the top 5 but saying how you can get into the top 5
- We’ve shared our aims with our businesses by email regularly
- We’ve been inviting our businesses to benefit from MayBe’s insights, training and platform regularly
- We’ve used Maybe’s dashboard and place insights to plan our campaigns and share insights with our businesses
- We’ve rocked up without fail to Maybe’s weekly webinars to gain further insights on what works and how we can be the best place we can be.
It’s helped our own account too. Instagram followers are growing on average 6% per month, and Facebook followers have increased 15% (since June), with a healthy level of engagement – all of which means any local posts we share reach a growing audience.
We are delighted that our hard work is paying off. We’ll continue to encourage more engagement, whilst starting our campaign to get more businesses active in social media. So any Knowle businesses who aren’t posting yet, we’re here to help and we’ll be visiting soon!
K Hulse Consulting 