Summary: Helping people and businesses get back to what they love in Colchester through digital communications
Client: Colchester Borough Council
Project title: Make your day
Timescale: December 2021 – March 2022
Objective
Colchester Borough Council (CBC) wanted to create a campaign welcoming people back into the borough and encouraging them to support the local economy post pandemic. CBC identified three target audiences: cautious residents, residents who need nudging back, and residents who are already active in the borough. The campaign also had three key objectives based around supporting the public returning to what they love, the COVID-19 safety measures, and local businesses.
Aphra’s aim was to create a mixed tactic campaign with extensive audience and demographic engagement. We also wanted to ensure the campaign struck a personal and emotive tone for maximum impact whilst being accessible and inclusive.
Process
Aphra created a full cycle marketing campaign based on the creatively crafted concept “Make your day”. The assets asked the public what would make their day or someone else’s in the borough and carried a warm and personal tone.
As the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing during this project, it was essential that Aphra was responsive, agile and adaptable in everything we did, changing campaign delivery plans, or including COVID-19 safety measures in assets are examples of this.
For maximum impact and engagement, we used video to launch the campaign and capture people’s imagination. Our team collaborated with local artists to create a spoken word poem that would create a story around each of the areas of the borough, with a clear message for people to get back to what they love. The video used footage of local places and people, offering a personal connection and emotive messaging.
The poem featured as a consistent through line for each of the Make Your Day campaign deliverables, including social media, print and digital, campaign booklets, an online competition, a radio advert and webpages.
Aphra identified the need to target businesses using a sub campaign which included campaign packs with posters, stickers and booklets for businesses to promote their involvement, and a dedicated podcast series focused on business recovery post pandemic.
- 219,000 video views on social
- 401,000 social media impressions
- 229,000 radio impacts
- 6,000 website clicks
- 55,000 digital ad impressions
- 1,500 engagements
