Tower Hamlets Council Transformed Community Engagement Rates
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Our Marketing Local Government Case Study for Tower Hamlets Council
Tower Hamlet Council struggled to connect with diverse residents, experienced low online engagement and was spending too much on underperforming ads. An Audit revealed opportunities to enhance digital query responses, increase social media engagement, and reduce wasted ad budget. JReece Digital revamped their communications procedures, improved data analytics capabilities, and employed split testing to optimise digital media performance. Just 6 months after implementation, they saw the following:
16%
Drop in Ad Spending
22%
Increase in Social Media Engagement
15%
Higher Email Click-Through
Tower Hamlets Council’s Ad Spend Dropped 16% while Social Media Engagement Rose 22% After These Smart Marketing Moves
The Problem
Local government entity Tower Hamlets Council faced a modern challenge: engaging a diverse resident base in an effective, timely, and cost-efficient manner. However, despite their best efforts, they struggled with:
- Lack of Meaningful Connection:Their digital touchpoints weren’t optimised for the volume and variety of resident communications they received daily.
- Low Click-Through Rates and Engagement:Amid residents' busy lives and the distracting nature of the Internet, their outbound messaging (advertising, email, social media, etc.) we largely unseen.
- Low Return on Investment (ROI):Despite spending significantly on advertising, they could not reach the right people with enough impact to make a difference.
Audit, Research, and Planning
To tailor services to Tower Hamlets Council’s unique needs, we initiated a rigorous audit of their current digital communication processes. In addition to identifying the council’s objectives, and audiences, we recognised the council’s need to connect meaningfully and consistently and with residents. For this reason, we simplified how the council responded to queries by working with them to develop a process for answering resident communications via digital channels in place of slower forms of communication such as telephone or Royal Mail. We identified the most common types of resident queries and introduced message sentiment value as a KPI. This would allow us to track sentiment over time and, by doing so, deliver clarity about how the people of Tower Hamlets perceived our performance and what their most common and pressing concerns were.
Finally, we determined that we could improve the cost-effectiveness of paid media advertising by targeting specific geographic areas and demographics to reach the council’s target audience while keeping costs low. This allowed us to send each area the most relevant email and advertising communications.
This research and initial enhancement of data collection and analysis capabilities allowed us to move forward with the implementation phase of our approach for local government digital marketing.
As a result of our ad cost-effectiveness strategy, Tower Hamlets experienced a 16% reduction in Ad Spend.
As their consultant, I set out to show them why an investment in these areas would deliver an ROI that justified improving these key elements both in the short term and over time.
Joshua Reece
Digital Marketing Consultant
Implementation
Based on our research and initial analytics, we developed a digital marketing strategy that included several key components:
Creating high-quality content
We created content that answered the most common queries, with the intent to reduce the number of queries employees need to respond to directly and enhance customer experience.
Managing social media and email marketing
To further enhance communication and community engagement, we managed their social media and email marketing.
Designing and executing digital campaigns
To keep the constituents of Tower Hamlets informed and feeling supported by their local government, we designed and executed digital campaigns.
We used our process for responding to resident communications mentioned earlier to ensure that all queries were addressed in a timely and effective manner. We also implemented our split testing solution for email communications, which involved testing different elements of the emails to improve open rates and click-through rates while simplifying and automating the email schedule to make it easier to manage.
Our email campaigns resulted in a 15% increase in click-through rates as community members felt more engaged by their local government.
Analysis and Optimisation
Our next step was to further increase our effectiveness by cutting wasted time and money out of our processes while enhancing results. We do this by tracking the performance of our digital marketing campaigns using key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and audience reach.
We used our split testing and watched how the corresponding KPI impacted the solution. This allowed us to identify the most effective messaging for our email communications and make changes to our campaigns accordingly. This avoided overspending on marketing that wasn’t working and allowed us to further improve the engagement rate in the community.
We also analysed the performance of our paid media advertising campaigns and made adjustments to our targeting and messaging to improve performance and maximise the council’s budget.
Our ongoing optimisation efforts over a 6 month period resulted in a 22% increase in social media engagement and a 16% decrease in cost-per-click for our paid media campaigns.
Reporting and Recommendations
Given that we are able to generate these impressive improvements in a short time, we know that ongoing improvements over a longer time window would further increase community engagement and reduce advertising costs. JReece Digital is committed to delivering short-term results that allow clients to see why improvements like these are worth the investment.
We presented our findings to Tower Hamlets Council and provided recommendations for future digital marketing campaigns. Our report highlighted the success of our digital marketing efforts and identified areas for improvement. We recommended that the council continue to invest in digital marketing, especially in social media and email marketing, as these channels had the highest engagement rates. We also recommended continuing to use our split testing solution to optimise email communications and to explore new technologies and strategies for improving resident engagement. Finally, we suggested continuing to use our cost-effective solution for paid media advertising and considering expanding our targeting and messaging to reach even more of the council’s target audience.
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