The Challenge
The City of Arlington’s downtown, like many others nationwide, experienced a decline in economic vitality and foot traffic in the aftermath of Covid-19. In response, the City launched the Meet Me in Arlington, an initiative to restore and strengthen local economic vigor in the City, in partnership with the Stilly Valley Chamber of Commerce, Washington State University, Seattle North Country, and the Downtown Business Association.
In 2023, the City increased its investment in the campaign to expand its digital media presence and reach. This included videos, images, and paid social media advertising across multiple channels. However, when attempting to analyze the effectiveness of the campaign a double-challenge arose. First, compiling engagement data from various platforms proved to be a tedious and time consuming task and second, it was hard to tell if more than the vocal few engaged with the campaign.
The Zencity Solution
To amplify and easily measure the effectiveness of its Meet Me in Arlington economic vitality campaign, the City of Arlington turned to the Zencity platform. By creating a dedicated dashboard for the campaign, defining keywords, channels and the context from which to draw relevant interactions from all publicly available online sources the platform enabled the City to gather meaningful ongoing feedback from more residents, all into one place. The Zencity platform also enabled the City to gather meaningful ongoing feedback from more residents than before and implement key takeaways from it into their campaign in real-time.
The Impact
With the assistance of Zencity’s platform, the City of Arlington was able to effectively evaluate the success of their digital media campaign and make informed decisions about future marketing strategies. Zencity’s quarterly report for Q1 of 2023, provided Council and Staff with key insights into the drivers of positive sentiment towards the initiative. This data allows the initiative’s staff to update digital media marketing strategies and improve their efforts moving forward.
By tracking sentiment and reactions, Zencity offers an extra layer of data that will help support the investment in the project, as well as justify the expense over the long-term. With the ability to adapt communications based on the findings of the report, the project is well-positioned for success and resilience in the years to come.
