Reaching Trafford residents with tailored advice and support
In August we secured some funding through Trafford Council to reach Trafford residents with tailored advice and support online- using Google Ads and social media advertising.
Over the three month project (October to December), we’ll be using our local insight and data to identify the key issues that people are facing in specific areas of Trafford. We’ll plan campaigns around these issues, and use targeted advertising to reach our audiences with timely and relevant advice.
This is a great opportunity for us to raise awareness of our service and proactively reach out to people who may need support.
Here’s a quick update of what we’ve been doing in October…
We analysed our local data for the last month, identifying the top issues we were seeing in different parts of Trafford. Were people in Stretford, for example, experiencing the same problems as people in Altrincham?
Across the whole of Trafford the top issues we helped people with were:
- making an initial claim for benefits
- help with accessing food banks
We saw some differences when we narrowed down locations. For example, in Old Trafford we saw a higher number of people needing support with Debt Relief Orders, and in Altrincham we helped more people with accessing Personal Independence Payments.
We used this insight to design and plan ads across social media and Google Ads- encouraging people to access our support by signposting to our online advice and our free phone line.
Just one week in our top performing social media ad has reached over 7,000 people.
And we’re already seeing a big increase in impressions through our Google Ads- with one advert appearing over 15,000 times in Altrincham!
In addition to this, we ran a brand awareness campaign on LinkedIn, targeting people living or working in Trafford.
Two weeks into the campaign we have reached nearly 4,000 people.
What have we learned so far?
This has been an opportunity to experiment and test out our ideas. We’ve already learnt a lot about the scope and limitations of Google keywords, the ability to target audience by search behaviour and detailed demographics and the skill involved in using online advertising effectively!
We’ll take what we’ve learned and use it to improve our strategy for next month’s ads.
We are also aware of the gaps in our data. Our data is based on people living in Trafford who have used our service. What do we know about those who aren’t accessing our support?
This is something we’ll explore further in the next stage of our project.
