Make It Here!
Maple Ridge – Make it Here
The City of Maple Ridge recently adopted a new Economic Development Strategy. Through this journey, we learned that one of the community’s strategic advantages is our manufacturing sector. Within the Metro Vancouver region, our community offers a great value proposition for investors, with lower business costs, great location, coupled with local workforce strengths. We provide all those competitive advantages.
The recent creation of the Strategy provided several ambitious goals to improve the future our city. One of them was to “Create a Manufacturing-Influenced Brand and Marketing Campaign”; specifically, to implement an investment and resident attraction “Make It Here” brand and marketing campaign that aligns with strategic direction. To date, we have trademarked our slogan Make It Here and have been developing assets to share our story. We have marketed Make It Here in two publications, created a web landing page, a pop-up banner for trade shows and recently released our Make it Here Video. The video is the latest tool in a fully digital marketing asset took-kit which has been shared on several on-line platforms.
The purpose of the video is promotional, to showcase this important sector, to educate and instill community pride in the strength of this sector, provide connectivity, and to attract and grow manufacturing businesses.
It proved challenging to select the right businesses to feature in the video. We wanted to be able to demonstrate the diversity of the sector, from craft breweries, value-added forestry, lithium-ion batteries to cheese crafters. We made sure to hit the right balance between showcasing the sector and the Maple Ridge lifestyle, knowing that lifestyle is an increasingly important site-selector criteria. In order to resonate with a dynamic section, we knew it had to be a fast-paced, authentic video that could be produced within our budget constraints. To capture lifestyle, we ransacked our archives for previous b-roll footage that could be repurposed; providing the right mix and quality of footage helped to keep our production costs low. Employees at the businesses selected were happy to be on camera providing authenticity to the message
Throughout the process, we had heated team discussions to make decisions and changes. We had to be selective with the right production team to work with and be very clear on our vision and direction as we moved through the process. We knew that six businesses would probably be our maximum and the correct mix was crucial. We were excited to discover so many women were working in the trades in Maple Ridge and we are proud to able to showcase the gender diversity in the video.
The intended audience for the video are residents, to instill community pride, and potential investors, regional partners and associations, with a goal to attract, grow and showcase our manufacturing sector. The video, although only recently released, has been extremely well received by the community, elected officials at all three levels of government and national and provincial manufacturing associations.
Maple Ridge invites new businesses to MAKE IT HERE!
