Enhancing Green Spaces in Communities
Challenge
Since 1995, Communities in Bloom has been fostering civic pride, environmental responsibility and beautification through a national program that focuses on enhancing green spaces in local communities. Annual grants, contests and promotions are managed through the organization in an effort to raise awareness and disseminate education on the value that sustainable development of green spaces and natural environments provide in Canadian society. Traditionally, this nonprofit has relied on raising awareness through its website, printed magazine, word of mouth from participants, volunteers and sponsors along with discussions on Facebook and Twitter. With only a basic strategy in place, participation rates were moderate with stagnant growth being realized on a yearly basis. In an effort to reach new participants and extend its impact across Canada, Communities in Bloom was looking into running online advertising campaigns. The charity had successfully applied for the Google Ad Grant program, which provides $10,000 in-kind to qualifying nonprofits. While the program is quite generous, navigating the platform and implementing these specific paid ad campaigns successfully required further attention to detail – it required Vicara Marketing.
Solution
Online Advertising Vicara Marketing helped Communities in Bloom expand the reach of its programs through paid search and social media advertising campaigns in an effort to increase the number of participating communities across Canada. We started with a complete audit of their existing Google Ads accounts, both the paid and in-kind ones. The keywords were reorganized into new ad groups to increase relevancy and boost quality scores. This also allowed us to create bilingual ad content that was more targeted for specific audiences. Facebook Ads were also utilized to raise awareness for promotional opportunities offered to participants in local communities. New ad campaigns were created for each initiative, which involved installing a tracking pixel, setting up a lead tracking script, defining the audience demographics and creating the ad content and visuals. A bid strategy was set to maximize conversions and a predetermined daily budget was allocated to each campaign. This was monitored on a weekly basis, while form submissions were managed by the staff at Communities in Bloom. Analytics Reporting The Communities in Bloom existing Google Analytics account was optimized by re-organizing the structure of property views for the English and French websites. Filters were created for each property based on IP address to bring clarity to the metrics by differentiating website activity between visitors and employees who are located in various offices. The account was also linked to the Communities in Bloom Google Ads accounts to gain a deeper understanding of the data by seeing the full visitor journey, from interacting with the ads to completing goals on the website. Since the organization relies on a variety of marketing activities to raise awareness and drive traffic, a business analytics platform named Databox was utilized to aggregate various sources of data into visual dashboards. This allowed our team to consolidate all the key performance indicators (KPIs) from the website, social media networks and ad campaigns into a single place, giving us a more complete view of the data and making it easier to generate insights. Web Hosting When Communities in Bloom began experiencing issues with their existing hosting provider, they turned to Vicara Marketing for a more reliable solution. We began by transferring the files and database for their existing website to our Virtual Private Server (VPS), then we ensured its full functionality before updating the DNS settings to complete the migration process. All existing email addresses were created and setup using the IMAP protocol to keep all data synced across multiple devices. A daily cron-job was scheduled to scan for viruses and spam-related issues were troubleshooted as needed. Although Vicara Marketing did not build Communities in Bloom’s current website, we have managed the process of updating plugins and troubleshooted issues as they arise. Social Media Vicara Marketing has supported Communities in Bloom with its social media presence via its Facebook business pages and Instagram account. The implementation of automation tools such as Zapier has also been discussed to facilitate the distribution of organizational news and updates.
Results
Vicara Marketing has facilitated the expansion and reach of Communities in Bloom’s national programs with targeted ad campaigns that generated 700,000+ impressions. They also reached over 50,000 people, which resulted in more than 2,000 visits to their website, where close to 500 leads were acquired with approximately $1,000 in ad spend. This performance has now set a benchmark for future campaigns that will be launched during key periods throughout the year. Now that Communities in Bloom is equipped with visual dashboards of aggregated data, optimized social media profiles and a reliable hosting solution, the organization is in a better position to expand the scope and budget of its marketing initiatives. With a trusted and successful partnership in place, Vicara Marketing will continue to work with Communities in Bloom to share this charity’s important story of people, plants and pride… growing together.
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