Fortifying Agency-Client Relationships: RSA and the City of Box Elder
– By #RSA
As a small, locally-owned business ourselves, Robert Sharp & Associates understands the immense time that goes into planning and hosting a successful event. We work with clients all throughout the year to help plan events such as the Central States Fair, Heart Ball, The South Dakota State Fair, and most recently added to our roster Patriot Day.
At RSA, we want each and every one of our clients to be successful, and we go above and beyond to do everything in our power to make sure that happens. So, when RSA was approached by the City of Box Elder to sponsor their upcoming Patriot Day celebration, our CEO Robert Sharp had an idea. Instead of becoming a paid sponsor of their event, RSA decided that we would help them market Patriot Day to the public. Our agency has a long-term relationship with the City of Box Elder and has worked with them on many projects. To us, this was a way to not only help support a wonderful event, but also build an even stronger relationship with our client.
To start, we had to learn more about the event and what goals the city had for this event. Patriot Day is a celebration to honor all active and retired military members and their families. It is the city of Box Elder’s way to help forge a connection between their community members and members of the Ellsworth Air Force Base, located in Box Elder.
Some highlights of the event included a parade, food trucks, bouncy castles, a strong man competition, petting zoo, face painting, and an evening fireworks show. In addition, all military members and Box Elder community members received a free $5 token that could be used at any of the food trucks present at the event.
After learning more about the event and what it means to the community of Box Elder, our team went to work. To begin, we started creating the various marketing materials needed for the event. To ensure the event had a cohesive look and message throughout all marketing aspects, our graphic designers worked to put together flyers, billboard designs, newspaper advertisements, banners, and event itineraries.
The RSA team utilized multiple avenues of traditional media advertising to help promote this event. We reached out to local news stations and radio stations in our area. Many of them generously agreed to help us promote the event by running PSA’s on their stations free of charge. The local newspaper helped us by running three ads in the week leading up to the event. In addition, we were able to secure billboard advertising in seven locations across town for the week leading up to the event. One of our favorite things about being part of a smaller community is the personal relationships we are able to build with our media partners. Being in business for over thirty years, we have developed strong relationships with various media outlets throughout the Black Hills region, and without those relationships, we wouldn’t have been able to make this event such a large success! But our marketing efforts didn’t stop there.
In addition to traditional media, our digital marketing team worked with the City of Box Elder to create a social calendar of posts for the entire month leading up to the event. These posts showcased what attendees could expect, sponsors of the event, event schedules and more. The City of Box Elder used their marketing budget to boost these posts to increase their engagement and further the reach of our campaign. We also added a page to their website educating people about the event and used our social posts to drive people to the website for more information. Our team created and sent out a press release to local news stations alerting them about the event. Four news stations published our press release and more came the day of the event to capture it!
The Fourth Annual Patriot Day was a huge success, and ended up being the largest event the City of Box Elder has ever hosted with over 4,000 attendees. The Facebook event more than doubled the event response record set in 2020. Meaning, with a strategic outreach and marketing plan featuring targeted content, we were able to more than double the amount of people who responded to their Facebook event. In addition, thanks to our social media posts, we were able to drive nearly one thousand people from Facebook to the Patriot Day landing page we created on their website, making this page the second most visited page on their website in the year, to date.
RSA was incredibly grateful to be able to work with our clients in Box Elder to promote this event and help celebrate all the military members in our community. We are so glad our marketing efforts helped make a difference in the outcome of this event and are so proud of our community and all the businesses and people that help it thrive. As members of the community ourselves, RSA will never shy away from the chance to lend a helping hand where needed and continue to build strong relationships with our clients that withstand the test of time.
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