Launching the Love Leam app - how BID Leamington prepared for success.
Overview
The Love Leam app showcases how digital place management solutions can help support local businesses, engage the community, and raise an area's profile. BID Leamington’s approach to the launch is also an example for other places to follow to ensure their own success. In using an existing consumer facing brand, and established marketing channels they were able to launch an app to their community, and register over 1200 users in 2 months.
Why digital solutions are important for place managers
In today's fast-paced digital world, using technology strategically and effectively is vital for managing and promoting places.
Vicinity provides digital place management tools, offering tailored solutions to meet each area's unique needs, including customisable CRM systems, detailed reporting tools, and branded apps, all supported by a dedicated team of data engineers, place professionals, and marketers.
The BID Leamington approach
BID Leamington is dedicated to enhancing the appeal of the town for residents, visitors, and businesses alike, operating across four key pillars: Promoting, Enhancing, Supporting, and Influencing. They provide vital support, address community concerns, and elevate the town's profile regionally, all contributing to a more cohesive and prosperous town.
Introducing Love Leam: BID Leamington’s vision
Love Leam was an existing consumer facing brand owned and operated by BID Leamington. The Love Leam website was already gaining nearly 40,000 visits a month and 5000 followers on Instagram alone.
BID Leamington already offered a small physical compendium of local business deals called 'The Little Book of Offers'. The booklet was printed and distributed twice a year but BID Leamington had no way of knowing who was collecting the booklets, how they were using them and ultimately how many deals were claimed and businesses engaged.
According to BID Director Stephanie Kerr, the vision for the app was to build a digital local community of people loyal to the town and the businesses. In doing so the app could capture some of the traffic coming to the website, understand where people are coming from, positively engage and reward them in different ways.
Offering a range of functionalities including loyalty schemes, exclusive deals, event listings, competitions and a local guide, the app needed to to be branded in accordance with the existing Love Leam brand. It needed to build on the existing Little Book of Offers, and encourage exploration of Leamington’s ‘hidden treasures’, while advertising local businesses and providing a platform to capture data.
Implementation
A hands on approach to app integration and content curation
The BID Leamington team took an active role in designing the app and procuring content from local businesses, attending training to develop their knowledge of the dashboard and app functions.
Training sessions detailed how to use the app and dashboard effectively: to create a captivating experience for app users, tailor app content to achieve goals and interpret the dashboard stats as an indicator of success.
The team personally visited local businesses to introduce the Love Leam app, secure exclusive offers and loyalty schemes, and encourage participation in trails. They were also able to use content from a pre-existing initiative - a compendium of local business deals called 'The Little Book of Offers'.
“Each place is a little different so spend time getting to know your community to establish which aspects of your app will appeal to your audience most.”
Launching the Love Leam app
BID Leamington kicked off their pre-launch with a ‘coming soon’ teaser on their public facing royal-leamington-spa.co.uk and loveleamington.com websites, inviting visitors to sign up for alerts once the app was released building up a waiting list of 100s of potential users.
During the launch phase, the team focussed on proactive social media campaigns and strategic marketing. They replaced the initial ‘coming soon’ teaser with an advertisement for the app, and incentivised app downloads with a launch competition, encouraging people to download the app and enter the competition on the giveaways tab for a chance to win a £200 shopping spree.
Regular updates on Facebook and Twitter sustained interest post-launch, and the consistent use of the #LoveLeam hashtag unified BID Leamington’s communications, ensuring widespread recognition of the app's branding, and facilitating the app's seamless integration into the community.
Additionally, the team conducted a leaflet drop, and integrated with local events to capture the attention of those that may have missed the digital announcements.
Stephanie Kerr, BID Leamington
"The goal is to grow a digital community that is loyal to our town and its businesses, that we can positively engage and reward in different ways."
Results and impact
Our post-launch review revealed incredible stats, demonstrating the positive impact of the app in just 12 weeks, including:
1,523 new user accounts created
12,160 interactions with the app
2,489 deal views
2,659 trail interactions
703 competition entries
Additionally, 75% of the users registered had redeemed deals more than once, indicating notable repeat user activity, no doubt resulting from the fantastic loyalty schemes curated by the team.
These insights provided the opportunity to customise the content to the audience - for example, the dog friendly trail was very popular, indicating that there would be an audience for offers and events tailored more towards dog owners.
How to launch an app successfully
The Love Leam launch process highlights the importance of engaging with businesses and the public early to build hype, creating an appealing launch competition, and utilising multiple available marketing channels to publicise the launch.
We also believe the following factors contributed to their success:
Proactive Collaboration:
Inviting the whole team to contribute towards the project created a solution that aligned with their goals and identity.
Including all team members in training sessions ensured they were confident promoting and using the app and using the dashboard to add content.
Identifying key performance indicators allowed the team to measure their success and refine their strategies or implement processes to target specific metrics if needed.
Strategic Pre-launch Initiatives:
Adding ‘coming soon’ teasers to marketing channels created awareness and anticipation of the app release and generated excitement.
Using an existing consumer facing brand ‘Love Leam’ with established social media presence created a familiarity with the app before its release.
Digitising pre-existing offers, loyalty schemes, and trails meant that the team had compelling content to display to businesses when introducing the app, and reduced the burden on getting lots of content for the launch.
Post-launch Marketing:
Continued proactive social media campaigns, regular updates and in-app push notifications sustained engagement with the app.
Open and ongoing communication with businesses encouraged longevity of loyalty schemes and fresh, interesting content.
Alternative marketing methods such as leaflet drops, and integration with local events, captured the attention of a broader audience.
Henry Jinman, Vicinity
"BID Leamington were thoughtful and resourceful in their approach. They maximised a high traffic website and existing customer brand well, seamlessly integrating the app into their other initiatives and built on the success of existing offer booklets and trails."
Final thoughts
BID Leamington were proactive, enthusiastic and motivated for the duration of the project, providing important feedback throughout implementation and engaging with every opportunity to learn and improve their processes. They successfully created a dynamic digital place management solution, enhancing the town centre experience for businesses, residents and visitors alike.
To establish longevity and their continued success, BID Leamington intend to refine their strategies and maintain the great relationships they have built throughout the years, using their app to drive positive change and deliver results in their four key focus areas.
Empower your area digitally
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