Organizational Identity Campaign: FirstPark Central Maine’s Most Connected Business Park
Objectives:
- Rebrand the park and highlight the quality of life for businesses in the park and that would want to relocate to the park.
- Raise awareness about FirstPark (FirstPark.com), a business park in Oakland, Maine, as an attractive place to start or relocate a business by attracting at least two new businesses and increasing overall prospect inquiries (website traffic) by 20 percent and visits by site selectors by 15%.
Situation Analysis:
FirstPark was established in 1999 by 24 municipalities and the business park recently hired a new executive director to help aggressively market and fill the several empty lots that have never been sold. It was clear the park needed an organizational identify plan that would vastly improve the brand of FirstPark. With a goal of becoming more recognized, FirstPark contracted with Marshall Communications to develop and implement a customized public relations strategy known as The Marshall Plan®. Included in the more than 120-page public relations and marketing strategy were methods and tactics for an organizational identity campaign. Target audiences included investors, site selectors, CEOs and CREs, commercial real estate brokers, entrepreneurs and startups.
Methods:
Marshall Communications worked with FirstPark to research and benchmark their website statistics and media results prior to starting the branding efforts.- Created a brand style guide that has been critical to the business park’s brand identity during the past year. We also helped FirstPark create Facebook and LinkedIn pages, plus plan for a future launch of a YouTube channel.
- Since most site selectors visit the website first, the website was refreshed and re-branded, as was the e-newsletter.
- Based on research and the organizational identity plan, we helped FirstPark promote itself as a dog-friendly business park as part of their brand and as a way to differentiate it from the several other local business parks. We worked with FirstPark to pitch the ribbon cutting for a new business that was moving into the park that was very happy that it was a dog-friendly park. The pitch resulted in great coverage from the local NBC affiliate and being dog friendly is now a major part of the park’s marketing and organizational identity moving forward.
- Used the agenda-setting theory to distribute press releases and several pitches.
- Created a customized dashboard to provide monthly reports.
Results
- From May to July 2018, traffic to the FirstPark website was up by 30% compared to the first three months of 2018, 10% more than our goal.
- Over the same period, leads for FirstPark increased by 157%.
- Since the plan, two new businesses moved into FirstPark, generating an ROI of 1,475%.
- Coverage views from media results were at 13.5 million, including Mainebiz and local TV (see media results).
- In the past six months, the FirstPark e-newsletter contact list has increased by 73 contacts (36%).
Ongoing
As part of our ongoing relationship with FirstPark and to continue to build brand recognition and awareness, we designed several display elements, recently used at a business expo. The booth was visited by businesses and individuals from around the region interested in information about central Maine’s most connected business park. In five hours, they had more than 300 visitors at their booth.
