Executive Summary
The City of Meadville and partner organizations were looking to market the city and its retailers to increase local business revenue during the 2018 holiday season. Their goal was to engage potential visitors and shoppers from the tri-state region using a holiday commercial distributed through YouTube and Facebook. They also hoped to use this as a catalyst to increase residual engagement to other marketing efforts by the local Chamber, Business Alliance, and businesses during the holiday season. In this case study you will see how a well executed commercial paired with a strategy for distribution created a successful campaign.Challenges
The City of Meadville is in a position requiring them to satisfy multiple masters when considering any project. While they are forward thinking in seeing the need to market their town to encourage new shoppers, tourists, residents, and businesses, this is a complex process given a taxpayer based funding stream marketing a community while not showing favoritism to any one business or businesses.Engagement through humor
The main goal of this project was to create a family friendly, engaging commercial with a memorable message to encourage visitors to Downtown Meadville during the holiday season. A satire from the well known “Dollar Shave Club” commercial was used to promote that Meadville was “flipping great” with walk on roles by local business owners, but none of their business names listed specifically.
Going viral
This tongue in cheek humor mixed with a memorable message, drove the video to viral status, according to Facebook’s definition, within 72 hours.
Higher engagement
As residual impact, marketing videos by the local Chamber of Commerce during the holiday season saw a significantly higher engagement over the same project and time period the year before.
Facebook paid views
Paid views were above industry benchmarks. Three major markets and many small mid size markets were reached.
16,252
video views
1,374
link clicks
36
comments
80
shares
Markets
17,584 (49.7%)
Ohio
11,504 (32.5%)
Pennsylvania
6,272 (17.7%)
New York
48 (0.1%)
Virginia
High post performance
Organic post reach was high and within “viral status” according to Facebook metrics.
46,650
people reached
28,413
video views
2,651
reactions, comments and shares
8,988
post clicks
1,065
clicks to play
47
link clicks
7,876
other clicks
