Saving the HighStreet by Creating Brand Ambassadors

By Kathy Kyle Bonomini, Founding Partner, Amplia Group

In 2019, a year into our engagement with the Dorking Town Partnership, Dorking was recognised by the Telegraph as one of Britain’s top five highstreets.

The brief: Put Dorking on the Map

We were engaged to develop and implement a social media strategy and website to support its digital transformation goals. However we also suggested our client engage in a brand ambassador programme via social media training with local businesses and community partners; visual storytelling via three promotional films; and a content generation programme that empowered customers to take ownership of the HelloDorking brand platform that we created.

Amplia Group’s success is evidenced in increased footfall at events, positive social media sentiment and engagement, and increased exposure in national and regional media.  

Our work is aligned to our client’s goal of ensuring that ‘The Community falls back in love with Dorking’.

When our client launched their Business Improvement District (BID) in 2017, much like many high street businesses across the UK, business in general felt disenchanted due to retail challenges. Dorking is a unique market town that boasts exceptional natural beauty, eclectic and authentic shops and restaurants, whilst being an easy commute to London. For the first six months of our project, we focused on promoting Dorking's brand and USP using social media, video, and the BID's LoyalFree app with target audiences to increase brand awareness and footfall in the town. For the second six months, we set to work on creating brand ambassadors of our audience.

The Plan

Prior to our engagement, the BID engaged a local creative agency to rebrand the BID’s logo. The BID then engaged Amplia Group to launch its omni-channel digital strategy and customer-focused website. We created a bespoke destination website for our client, launched and executed an integrated omni-channel communications strategy, and produced a promotional video with our partners, Objekt Films. We designed the website to reflect the town's independent quirkiness and artistic flair in the design. Each Dorking business and community partner - shops, cafes, hotels and more - have a presence on the website.

The BID destination website provides a seamless customer journey, where we have crafted suggested itineraries for shoppers, foodies, families, adventurers, art-fanatics and those with an independent spirit. We have provided social media training for Dorking businesses and community partners with a view to creating brand ambassadors who will help to amplify our message and also build their own platforms upon which to grow their following. View our social media training feedback.

Our efforts have led to economic investment in the town, positive sentiment across all channels and increases in attendance at large-scale events. The BID has held town-wide events that have drawn nearly ten thousand visitors each, from a unique motorsport event that generated national coverage to a Christmas Festival and Window Competition judged by Mole Valley’s MP culminating in Small Business Saturday.

We produced the ‘Escape to Dorking’ video, which reached 60,000 viewers with over 12,000 engagements, driving visitors to town. We’ve created three additional videos to inspire tourists to visit Dorking: Shop Local, Tourism, and a ‘Mayflower’ film that focuses on exploring one’s Dorkinian-American ancestry. Currently one week into distribution and both films are tracking at around 20,000 views across combined channels.

How we did it

In addition to designing and developing their website, we renamed the BID “HelloDorking” and launched new social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) and also composed a #TravelThursday blog. We coordinated the campaign for an Instameet with @IGERSSURREY for the first Surrey Day in May 2019. A central tenet of our digital strategy is to create an online and offline community of Dorking ambassadors. We routinely conducted media monitoring and outreach to build community and goodwill, actively supporting community-interest events both in town in the surrounding villages.

To create engaging, authentic digital experiences, we knew we must plug in to the local audience. So we asked our community for content and populated our feeds with beautiful, inspiring photos that aligned to our editorial calendar, themes, and brand. We not only created an authentic and engaging digital experience, we created brand ambassadors across all stakeholder audiences. We also designed print editorial for the BID’s Surrey Life July issue - but in true ‘Create Once, Publish Everywhere’ fashion, we also created an online version of the piece, highlighted all of the businesses we featured in the print verson, and wrote a blog about the Top Five reasons shoppers should #ShopLocal in Dorking. We take a campaign-based approach to all that we do and we cross-promote our content across our channels in a bespoke way.

Our Results

We can measure our success via offline metrics, as evidenced by the attendance at the town’s incredibly successful Christmas Festival. Our efforts also supported earned media generated by the award-winning businesses in Dorking as well as by direct pitches we engaged in on the BID’s behalf (The Telegraph, The Times, Timeout London, The Telegraph with Steve Drake, London Standard).

We collaborated and promoted the BID’s films and campaigns across community channels and with local community partners, hotels, local authority organisations, schools, trusts, nonprofits and groups. We have created ads, films, campaigns, strategies, talking points, newsletters, blogs, press releases and are in the middle of awards season. The Dorking BID was a finalist in the ATCM Place Management 2019 awards and has applied for a GB Highstreet Rising Star Award (it received a Special Mention in 2018 when we applied last year). Three high street shops are finalists in their respective industry award categories and recently Dorking Travel won a prestigious industry award.

We receive countless direct messages and emails from channel partners and interested independents interested in collaborating with the BID on projects. Social media has become a lead generation tool and another channel to monitor for brilliant ideas.

We are visual and digital storytellers. For the past eleven months, we have collaborated across the fabric of a town in order to help save a local economy. In the process, we helped to build a community of brand ambassadors whose collective voice is one that we are proud to be a part of.