Leveraging Social Media for Brand Awareness, EastonMainStreetDidit…and they Liked it!

The Easton Main Street Initiative, established just a decade ago and serving the riverside city of Easton, Pennsylvania, decided it was time to give ourselves a pat on the back.

Owning it, a/k/a the #HumbleBrag

Being a Main Street Program in an otherwise vibrant community makes differentiating your efforts from those of the city or other groups a challenge—especially when it comes time for “the ask”. Because our efforts are often “behind the scenes” or not regularly associated with a single event or venue, we realized that our hurdle was Brand Awareness. Easton Main Street Initiative isn’t always the flashy group that’s out in the public eye. We’re more like the car engine; the sexy paint job and custom rims grab everyone’s attention, but pop the hood and we’re there, keeping things running.

So many people comment on our revitalized downtown district, often assuming that various projects are city initiatives. While we’re extremely fortunate to have city legislators that share our vision and make great strides in urban development and restoration, we realized that it was time to allow ourselves a moment in the limelight. This August, Easton Main Street Initiative set out to do just that. We are proud of all of our hard work for the betterment of the community, and we were ready to own it!

Planning and Execution

This project was borne out of our Organization committee. Our focus was on leveraging social media platforms for two reasons: 

1. Cost.  No postage necessary, no ad spend—just a few dollars to occasionally boost a post. 
2. Shareability.  If we wanted to get ourselves out there, we had to do it in a way that our brand advocates and passers-by, alike, could further our message with a simple click.  We’d identified the How, we just needed the What. We tossed ideas back and forth for over a year. We brainstormed everything from photo contests to testimonials, but nothing felt right.

We needed a Blabbermouth

Fortunately for us, Easton Main Street Volunteer, Tracey Werner, President of Blabbermouth Communications specializes in Social Media Marketing. She helped us to refine our campaign and offered to get the word out by coordinating posts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the entire month. Our Organization Committee had the gratifying task of brainstorming dozens of our biggest, most popular, and most crowd pleasing projects that we felt the community would benefit from knowing that we were behind. We dug through all of our notebooks and picked the brains of Kim and Amy, our awesome Main Street Managers to come up with a strong list. We wrote copy for each of the posts and Amy gathered all of the accompanying photo assets. We laid out every post across the month of August in an effort to marry our achievements (humblebrags) with relevant events scheduled around town during that period. With fingers crossed, we handed it all off to Tracey. Not only did she curate our posts across three platforms, she engaged in real-time with our followers, live-tweeted events, and added her personal flair, marketing know-how, and love of the city to each day’s postings.

Response

The response from the community was heart-warming and overwhelming. Tracey had posted teasers in the days leading up to August 1, so our audience was prepared. On Day 1, our first about the Little Free Libraries all over the city saw higher than average engagement across all three platforms. This was followed by a second strong day with our Alley String Lights. Things were up and down from there, but it appeared that aesthetic enhancements and improvement statistics were the posts that delighted the most.

Reminding the community about the vast array of projects of varying scale and visibility in a fun and engaging way definitely got people’s attention. Now when they walk past a mural, stop to admire the flowers, or see groups of volunteers scurrying about town before an event, they might more readily show their appreciation for our efforts with a donation of time or dollars. Anchoring the What that they love about Downtown Easton to the Who that made it happen, makes our ask less of a cold call and more of an invitation to participate in the ongoing betterment of the community.

Geeking out. The Metrics.

We also used this opportunity to gather information about what projects have resonated the most with the community. Turns out, some of the things that we were proudest of, don’t appear to be the grand slams we had anticipated and some of the tiny pet projects really appealed to community more than we ever could have imagined.

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We learned a lot about response across different social media platforms. This was a great bonus take-away, especially when having to prioritize projects and allocate resources. We now have the data to support our decisions and can feel confident that our time is being well spent. As it turns out, we’re a visual community—although we have just under 1000 Instagram followers, they are a highly engaged group. They double-clicked for an average 4.34% response rate throughout the campaign, with our most liked post (Alley way lighting projects on August 2nd) gaining 8.56%!  Facebook, on the other hand, with followers numbering just under 5000, had a softer response overall, but had some huge spikes on certain days. Even with a smaller percentage of people liking and sharing, this platform gave us the farthest reach into the community and beyond. Twitter did not perform like the others and we need to reexamine our strategy if we wish to continue using this platform.

Next Steps
1.    Devising a second social media campaign. (And we’ve got an idea!)
2.    Taking our annual appeal online. 

Search #EastonMainStreetDidIt on your favorite social media platform to see all the campaign posts.

Jules Vicidomini has lived in Easton for much of her adult life, attending Lafayette College and returning after living abroad.  By day, she’s in Consumer Marketing for Bicycling Magazine at Rodale Inc, but around Easton Main Street Initiative, she’s the current Chair of the Organization Committee.