10 minute read
Promoting
Promoting Spend: £379,313 - 52% of Total BID Project Budget
A thriving city centre is a place people want to visit and spend time in. We have carefully invested in promoting the BID area, creating activity and engagement to support the BID community.
In five out of the eight months being reported Edinburgh retail sales saw annual growth. Although both September and November 2019 saw declines, these were equalled out with growth in October, December and January leaving the eight months reported as flat.
Both the UK and Scotland followed a similar trend, averaging out into very slight annual declines of 0.8% and 1% respectively.
Average hospitality sales across the eight months showed substantial growth of 5.6%, with September the stand-out month with an 11.1% annual increase.
Over 90% of respondents to the Edinburgh Visitor Survey, conducted by STR, agreed that the shops in the BID area were of a higher quality than elsewhere in the city and 74% believed the quality of eating and drinking on offer was better in the BID than the city overall.
George Street Festival We worked with Assembly Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival again in 2019 to animate George Street during August.
This successful mixture of festival entertainment and extended on-street space for our restaurant and bar businesses helped increase dwell-time within the BID area, helped boost footfall in the surrounding area and helped increase hospitality sales by 8.1% on August 2018 – all despite the poor weather, again, during August 2019.
Film Fest in the City A firm favourite of businesses and residents, this annual free film bonanza was unfortunately cancelled due to Covid-19 and unable to be rescheduled during this operational year. Planning is already underway for an enhanced event in 2021.
We are Essential Edinburgh, looking after you and our city centre.
Edinburgh Farmers’ Market During the eight months being reported there were over 250,000 visitors to the market. Over 50% of visitors went on to shop, eat or drink in the city centre - spending on average £27 – giving the market an economic impact to the city centre of almost £3.4 million.
This was our final year of operation of the market. In August 2020 the farmers’ market was handed over to a cooperative of producers to operate.
The market will continue to attract hundreds of thousands of customers each year, to the benefit of businesses in the area. With over 50% of visitors annually going on to shop, eat or drink in the city centre, we are certain that this will continue to be the case without our involvement in the market. Essential Edinburgh staff can now focus entirely on the BID area and BID businesses.
Communicating with you We work hard as a team to keep you updated, informed and engaged. We use every tool at our disposal to share important and interesting information; we use all available digital platforms and our Business Engagement Managers to keep the information flowing. Do make sure you are following us on social media, and that you are on our mailing list.
Our Business Engagement Managers are not just a key communication conduit, they are there to support your business in any way they can.
Between 1st July 2019 - 29th February 2020 we were operating with one Business Engagement Manager (previously BID Liaison Officer) who interacted with 420 businesses within the BID during that time. This is such a crucial role, ensuring we are supporting your business, that we have doubled our Engagement Manager positions. If you haven’t yet met them, do get in touch to see how we can support you.
We are Essential Edinburgh, looking after you and our city centre.
Sign of a Great Time Marketing Campaign Year Two of the BID-centred marketing campaign began with one of our biggest activations to date - the ‘Grab a Great Time’ game.
The activity was twofold: an in-person experience using a bespoke branded arcade grabber machine, situated on Castle Street, packed full of prizes, discounts and offers from BID members.
Secondly, the first ever series of city centre Flash Sales – a digitally led activation across our social channels that gave Edinburgh residents the chance to, quite literally, grab a great time from BID members across Edinburgh City Centre.
The Flash Sale prizes were smaller in number but of a high value and for a limited time only. The Flash Sales spanned four weeks and were ‘live’ during optimum engagement times for our target audience. Christmas Grotto with a twist – our Gift of Giving Grotto in partnership with Lothian Bus.
The Gift of Giving Grotto was held on George Street, opposite The Dome, within a dressedup Lothian bus, complete with decorations and a very special driver – Santa. He was waiting inside to meet children and help them choose an affordable stocking filler for their loved ones.
This activity delivered an exciting inperson activation to raise awareness of the participating BID members, incredible array of city centre retailers and spread festive cheer in the lead-up to the holiday season.
Award Winning Our BID-area marketing campaign won Gold at the Marketing Society Star Awards in the Retail category. A large part of it’s success is the engagement from you, our levy-paying businesses. So a big thank you to everyone who has been involved in the on-street activations and social media activity over the past two years.
Lothian Bus Partnership
Our partners at Lothian Bus provided Essential Edinburgh with a bus-branding opportunity.
Our beautiful city centre bus has been circulating Edinburgh since November 2019, and at time of this publication was still visible on Edinburgh’s roads.
#EdinburghGreats Our core promotional spike for end of 2019/2020 focussed on the people and businesses that make the city centre unique - our #EdinburghGreats.
Unfortunately, due to the COVID outbreak we were unable to broadcast our final video as planned at the start of April, however we still saw huge success from December to early March 2020.
The videos helped the @EdinCityCentre channels receive over 3 million impressions between December and March, as well as 23,891 engagements and a 3% hike in followers across all channels.
The two most successful Facebook posts for the whole year hailed from #EdinburghGreats – Veganuary and #DitchNewYearsResolutionDay topping the ranks of engaged-with content.
This reporting year there have been 75 pieces of branded print and online coverage with 3.75million OTS (opportunities to see). Edinburgh Gift Card The Edinburgh Gift Card launched alongside the City Centre Marketing Campaign in October 2018. It is a pre-paid Mastercard that is currently accepted in over 100 BID area businesses. It is helping to lock in spend for Edinburgh city centre businesses; encouraging people to explore our great city and share their messages with friends, family and colleagues.
Within this reporting year almost £13,500 was spent in 330 transactions and almost £23,000 was loaded to 382 Edinburgh Gift Cards. As of September 2020 over £20,100 of Edinburgh Gift Cards were in circulation.
As a levy-payer it’s free to accept the gift card. There’s no additional hardware or software required, no joining fee and you will get free promotion as part of the scheme through spotlight campaigns, promotional messages and competitions. So make sure you are signed up to accept the Edinburgh Gift Card and benefit from the locked-in spend in the city centre.
Burns&Beyond and Chinese New Year Festivals 2020 The second year of this innovative partnership event, produced by Unique Events, saw Chinese New Year and Burns Night occur on the same date.
To celebrate, a bumper twelve-day festival programme was produced which included some traditional Burns Night celebrations and ceilidh’s mixed with music, spoken word, comedy, busking, trails, lion dances, lanterns and theatre.
“Too many highlights to choose from!! This is the Edinburgh festival that should be in everyone’s calendars. Loved it!!” - Burns&Beyond festival feedback survey
Our investment of £20,000 in this £300,000 partnership event ensured the continuation of the successful Red, Red Rose Street events programme and animation of the BID area, including the family trail Rabbie’s Ramble, 10,000 Lucky Chinese Envelopes distributed for business use, and The Big Burns Quiz.
As a result of the activities, footfall in Rose Street increased 4.5% compared to the same time the previous year.
“Soaking up the fantastic line-up this Culture Trail and whizzing around Red, Red Rose Street with the kids letting them join in the fun too. Simply fantastic!” - Festival feedback survey
We are Essential Edinburgh, looking after you and our city centre.
In 2020 both the Freemasons Hall and the Assembly Rooms were included as venues. The Assembly Rooms hosted the Burns&Beyond Festival Club; presenting a four-night programme of spectacular live music and dance enjoyed by over 4,500 people.
It was a sell-out events programme at Freemason’s Hall with the Not So Traditional Burns Supper, new free Bairns Burns Supper and the Major Minor Music Club where parents and kids could enjoy great music together.
The festival welcomed over 34,000 people to Edinburgh city centre to enjoy free and ticketed events. It was a strong local audience with 69% of attendees hailing from Edinburgh (48.5%) or the Lothians (20.4%). 84% of attendees said they would either not have celebrated Burns Night at all or would have celebrated at home if they had not attended Burns&Beyond.
Edinburgh WOWS! Working closely with the Edinburgh Cultural Venues Group we have financially supported and promoted the digital marketing campaign “Edinburgh Wows”.
This campaign highlights Edinburgh’s yearround cultural offering and aims to boost the non-festival months, communicating the emotional experiences derived from visiting our vast offering of world class cultural venues.
At the end of phase 2 of paid advertising - March 2020 - there had been over 1.5 million video views, over 3 million reach, and over 13 million impressions across YouTube and Facebook.
101 Objects In partnership with agencies across the city we continue to support 101 Objects, promoting important historical objects in our BID area.
China Ready – Weibo & WeChat With over 94,000 combined followers and over 220 million impressions to September 2020 the official Edinburgh Weibo and WeChat channels are increasingly valuable assets for local businesses.
Through collaboration with the China Ready group and ETAG we have been able to offer a regular platform for our levy-payers to engage with this growing audience.
In addition to Burns&Beyond Chinese New Year 2020 (CNY) celebrations, we worked in partnership with Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG), Unique Events and Heriot Watt University’s Confucius Institute for Business and Communication, to offer a platform for our businesses to be in the official Edinburgh Chinese New Year celebratory programme. The campaign was the largest Edinburgh has produced with 25 events and 16 dedicated promotions, a 30% increase in activity from the previous year. The campaign had a large number of media placements, including front pages, TV and China Daily.
