Do you invest in local marketing? For many small business owners, this can be a key marketing channel and focus. There are some fabulous opportunities to help you build a community of supporters in your local area, particularly if you live in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead! This month we are delighted to welcome a guest blog from Kath Harlow, who manages the Advantage Card programme – here is what Kath had to say:
What is the Advantage Card?
The Advantage Card is a residents’ loyalty card for the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead. Residents get free entry to the beautiful Windsor Castle plus around 200 other discounts on shopping, dining and day’s out.
At the Advantage Card, our mission is to grow and develop a strong community of successful businesses supported by loyal local residents. There’s nothing like a friendly supporter popping into your shop, or giving your business a call, to give you a sense that we’re all in this together. We live in a beautiful area and the Advantage Card is a great way for residents to discover what’s on their doorstep.
There’s a lot of value to be found in local marketing and it’s great to be able to support independent businesses with easy to access, adaptable promotions that reach their target market. It’s hard enough building a business and if we can support each other, we’re developing a community rich in ideas, innovation and with a bigger and better chance of growth. It makes the Royal Borough a wonderful place to live and work.
The Advantage Card offers any businesses a free website listing so long as they offer a discount to our residents. The free website listing is great for building SEO. It perfectly complements a Google My Business listing, website and social media pages, by signalling to search engines that your website content is valued. Working hand-in-hand with a promotion, link clicks through to your website will build traffic and help your analytics develop web visitor insights.
What kind of results can I expect?
We use email marketing to promote our offers and with years of hard work we’ve built a strong following of residents who are looking for things to do and places to go. Our audience knows what to expect from our e-newsletters, with open rates consistently around 50% (vs an industry average of 10%) and click through rates at 20% (vs an industry average of 3%), making the tool a great media to work with. We also get great feedback from our advertisers, with some promotions getting booked online within an hour of our e-news going out! With carefully curated content and offers, we can maintain a high level of quality for our offers, which is great for advertisers and Advantage Card holders alike. Email marketing is one of the best returns on investment for marketing spend, and with the Advantage Card you can tap into our resources.
How to get involved
In terms of marketing, advertisers can trial offers on the Advantage Card to see what works well – discounts, money off, bulk buy or bring a friend-type offers. Compare from month to month to see which marketing and pricing strategy has delivered the most sales. Purchase can be tracked with discount codes to see which proposition is working best. There’s also the opportunity for collaboration with two or more businesses making an offer, for example a day out to include a boat trip, lunch and theatre, giving you scope to collaborate with other businesses.
We have great local support from the Royal Borough too, with social media shares to promote offers across Town Partnership and business support channels.
If you’d like to stand shoulder to shoulder with local businesses in a rising tide of successful growth, we’d love to support you! Click here to book a space on the Advantage Card.
Of course, if you also have a marketing challenge, we would love to hear from you! Please get in touch to arrange a no obligation discovery call.
