Move to Minto – Tour the Town Downtown Property Open House
The Town of Minto is an amalgamated, rural community located in midwestern Ontario with a population of 9,000. Move to Minto is the Town of Minto’s business attraction program/campaign. The main goal of the campaign is to increase awareness and consideration of Minto as a preferred destination to start a business among a targeted audience of families, young couples and retirees that are considering a move away from nearby cities south of Minto (1 – 1 ½ hours).
We used the Move to Minto brand to develop a promotional event titled “Tour the Town Downtown Property Open House”. This one-day event featured properties that were available for sale or lease, with the goal being to fill vacant properties in three downtowns. We worked with an interior designer and property owners to identify a potential business opportunity for their space, and then created renderings for their properties.
The rendering images were used to create on-brand, visually interesting window decals that covered the windows of the vacant properties. The window decals included QR codes that linked to property information on www.movetominto.ca/business. We also used the renderings to create sell sheets and social media graphics in preparation for the open house.
The event was held April 20th and originally featured eleven properties. In the end nine properties participated, as two of the participating properties ended up being rented prior to the event because of the advertising campaign. In addition to the properties on the tour, a Business Resource Centre was set up to showcase how the municipality and partners support businesseses.
We partnered with the Peel Newcomer Centre who brought a bus of 27 new immigrant investors on the tour.
A key part of marketing this event was online targeting to a specific audience within 1-1 ½ hours from Minto. We targeted based around user terms, activity, and interests based on themes to do with:
- moving a business;
- people in-market for commercial property rental;
- people identified as starting a business soon;
- small and large employers; and
- those researching business planning services and business growth strategies.
The primary goal for the online campaign was to drive awareness & consideration for both the Tour the Town event and the 2024 Business Attraction program within our target audience. We used Google’s Performance Max campaign, and the results were impressive:
- approximately 650,000 ad placements (impressions) in total were placed for our target audiences
- this includes over 37,000 video views (either at least 30 seconds of the long format video, or the entire duration of the shorter version) – this is incredible brand & consideration building
- over 78,000 ad interactions
- Nearly 500 high-interest actions (conversions) took place on the website
Additionally, the MovetoMinto.ca website received ~2,800 visits in the month leading up to the event (March 20 – April 20, 2024).
Six of the properties were either sold or leased because of this campaign and open house.
Feedback from realtors and property owners included 60% noting they received strong leads because of the event and 80% being happy with the number of visitors to their location.
One comment included: “thank you so much for putting on such a great event. More municipalities should try to do events like this. We really appreciate all the efforts you guys put into this and really appreciate being included in the event”.
Regarding sustainability of this program, we engaged real estate agents and property owners in the campaign creation process. This provided insight into the demographic groups that are interested in Minto, the locations people were coming from, and what people were looking for in the community to build our campaign.
Once the brand elements of the campaign were built out, we shared all assets with the property owners and agents to use in their marketing efforts to further increase brand awareness.
