case study: South Cambridgeshire District Council
Showcasing beautiful businesses to local residents
Sectors: Public sector, Leisure, Hospitality, Retail
The client
South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC) is a local authority in the East of England.
The second largest district in Cambridgeshire, geographically it forms a ring around the Cambridge City area and plays a key part in the economic growth of the region, successfully combining traditional industries such as agriculture and engineering with new sectors such as IT and biosciences.
Campaign: #OnYourDoorstep
The services
Paid social media campaign
Organic social media
Video
Photography
Strategic support
The numbers
Campaign duration: 18 weeks
3 platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
100 businesses promoted
8 Instagram guides produced
Facebook: Content seen by 750k+ people. 32k clicks. 1.12m impressions.
Facebook Likes: 2876. Shares: 863. Comments: 972
Instagram Reach: +330%. Impressions: +300%
Instagram engagement. Comments: +300%. Likes: +120%
Twitter: 463k impressions
Plentiful grateful comments, shares and responses from local businesses!
The challenge
We were approached by SCDC to support the Council’s Communications Team in delivering an online promotion of local businesses, high streets and community spaces, along with events taking place at the markets and elsewhere.
The mission here was to educate and remind residents about the wonderful businesses that are nearby, encouraging people to shop local rather than travel to bigger town centres or out-of-town retail parks.
As with any public sector body, it's essential to provide regular monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns so we can see the money is being spent wisely and getting the best return.
The approach
Working closely with the Communications team at SCDC we planned a schedule which would enable us to showcase as many businesses as possible, but in a cost-effective manner. The geography of South Cambridgeshire does not make this easy, rather than it being one condensed location where you can easily visit multiple businesses in one day.
We ensured we gained picture consent from the businesses themselves and followed any Covid guidelines around social distancing to make sure we kept everyone safe and happy during the shoots.
Focusing on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter - where SCDC already had established communities - we set about promoting the businesses across the area using organic and paid activity. The beautiful photography, clear graphics and the helpful, high-quality and frequent posts led to a clear increase in engagement and clicks.
The results
Throughout all the activity, we kept working closely with HDC, adhering to all health and safety measures, reporting on the success of the campaigns, and adapting activity and our action plan in line with the ever-changing challenges and restrictions of the pandemic.
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Sookio have been a great team to work with from the outset of our project.
They quickly grasped what we wanted from the project, and bought it to life with great photos and content to showcase the range of businesses in our district to enable and encourage people to support local businesses.
The team provided us with a clear project plan, and ideas on what we could include in our campaign and easily adapted to any changes that we needed to make through out the project.
Their local knowledge of our area was amazing as it meant they were able to take the lead and provide so much added value.
Your Head of Creative couldn't have been more helpful and enthusiastic - she was always willing to hear us out on our ideas, and help us work out what would work.
The absolutely most helpful aspect for us was that she was clearly confident to take the reins and run with the project, but would be able to identify any areas of concern and feed those back to us for our input.
She brilliantly grasped the support that we needed without needing too much steer from us, which means it really saved us so much time.
We would not hesitate to recommend Sookio to any other organisation interested in procuring an excellent marketing agency.
Communications Officer at South Cambridgeshire District Council