Advantage St. John’s
The City of St. John’s recently embarked on a strategic brand initiative that led to the establishment of the Advantage St. John’s sub-brand – a place marketing endeavour that is expected to amplify economic growth and enhance people and investment attraction opportunities for the City of St. John’s.
As the last two years have shown, the pandemic is causing major changes in our priorities, including how we live and work. In many large cities across the country, residents are leaving in hopes of finding a better quality of living. They’re moving away from large urban centres to find a sense of belonging and purpose. By contrast, the St. John’s region is experiencing its largest inward migration in nearly 50 years. It ticks a lot of boxes for those seeking something different.
With the mandate to market the many advantages of living, working, studying and investing in our beautiful and historic city, with a census metropolitan area that exceeds 200,000 people, Advantage St. John’s is directed at a predominantly national and international audience, although some overlap with our local business community and residents continues to be an added benefit.
The main goals behind the creation of the Advantage St. John’s brand include:
1. To attract and retain skilled workers, newcomers, remote workers and post-secondary students.
2. To attract and retain top-tier talent that can play a vital role in creating successful businesses.
3. To encourage economic growth, with an emphasis on our tech, ocean innovation, energy and mining sectors.
4. To continue to build an engaged workforce that benefits from a healthy work-life balance.
5. To standout in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
The St. John’s Advantage is too good not to share with the world’s investors, entrepreneurs, families and youth, and a strong, well-managed brand makes it easier to tell our story.
In the year since the brand was established, the advantagestjohns.ca website has received more than 25,000 page views from 12,000 users. Website visitors are predominantly North America-based, but numbers from Europe, the Middle East and APAC countries are showing a strong and growing interest.
Twitter followers have reached 1,250, and Facebook followers have reached 1,600 in the first year of our social media efforts. Social posts about The East Coast Trail and the job market in St. John’s, for example, have received 6,000 and 3,500 likes respectively. Momentum is also starting to build through additional efforts on LinkedIn and Instagram. Given the broad audience that Advantage needs to reach, these four social channels are an integral part of our strategic marketing efforts, with 65.7% of our current website traffic derived from our social channels in the first year.
Subscribers to our monthly Economic Snapshot newsletter have also grown to 1,113, and engagement/link clicks have more than doubled with the application of the new identity standards to the newsletter.
Downloads of various quarterly and annual publications from our website have also experienced an increased interest from visitors, and our “News From the Edge” blog page is one of the larger draws on the site.
