If you take full advantage of the funding now, together we can make sure local businesses are in a better place when the high street reopens and throughout 2021.
Westminster has one of the biggest economies in the country and relies heavily on the retail sector for many of its 600,000 jobs, so when the first lockdown was lifted it was one of the first councils to plan a reopening campaign.
Westco were commissioned to create a communications and brand that encouraged residents to start using their local High Street retailers again safely. We worked with Westminster’s communications, licencing and highways teams on a strategic plan that involved engaging businesses, BIDS, and councillors as well as consumers. We produced a distinctive brand that could be used for marketing materials, as well as business support packs and signage that could be used across the City.
We evolved the strategy to incorporate the hospitality sector when it reopened on July 4th 2020. This involved communicating the new licencing policy to a range of stakeholders as well as the public. It also meant expanding the campaign beyond residents to include visitors and commuters.
The campaign led to more than 5000 webpage views in the first four weeks and our social media content was shared hundreds of times.
We have continued to support the council and businesses through PR, influencer marketing, PR and digital support through the many twists and turns of the pandemic to date.
Richmond Council came to Westco for an EDRF shop local campaign that could be tailored to support each of the borough’s nineteen high street areas. We created a flexible visual language and brand guidelines that could be applied across email content, videos and social media posts to create messaging for both the hyper-local areas and Richmond as a whole.
The campaign needed to show the individuality of each area and embrace the strong sense of community that had emerged during lockdown. We ‘hero-ed’ the shop and café owners that residents knew so well, and encouraged them to journey out safely.
We also worked with council stakeholders to engage local businesses and get them on board with the campaign. This included encouraging them to share content and use hashtags across their owned channels. We created business packs, window stickers and lamp post banners so they show their support, as well as a series of 19 go-pro videos that provided a walk-through of each individual high street and the shops which had reopened.
The campaign was very successful and saw high levels of engagement across digital channels, 217 businesses sign up to the campaign and there were 75,000 unique visitors to the Shop Local webpage. More importantly, the council recorded a significant increase in visitor numbers across the borough.