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11
Jun
Knaresborough economy to receive boost from grassroots marketing campaign
Knaresborough’s town-centre economy looks set to receive a shot in the arm this autumn, thanks to a new campaign from community marketing specialists Totally Locally.
The firm has been awarded £39,000 from the York and North Yorkshire mayor’s Vibrant and Sustainability High Streets Fund to help increase footfall in three towns: Knaresborough, Pickering, and Malton and Norton.
At a meeting in the Mitre pub in Knaresborough last night, Totally Locally’s Chris Sands and Simon Waldren explained to a crowded room of about 50 people – mostly local traders – what they could do for the town.
Mr Sands said:
Totally Locally is a grassroots, people-led, high-street movement. It’s a campaign that became a movement – it took on a life of its own – and it’s won loads of awards, even though we’ve never entered for any.
Basically, it’s all about collaboration and being nice. The whole thing is you never ask ‘What’s in it for me?’. If the town gets busy, it benefits everyone.
The pair have worked with several towns and regions before, with such success that they ended up putting all their resources online so that other communities could make use of them free of charge.
One initiative the pair pioneered started with the marketing message: If every adult in Calderdale spent £5 a week in local independent businesses, it would pump £40 million a year into the local economy.
The message had a huge impact locally, and it spread rapidly. It has since been adapted and adopted by more than 150 UK towns, from Burntisland in Scotland to Axminster in Somerset, and even by Villaines-la-Juhel in France, Eudunda in Australia and Waiheke Island in New Zealand.
Mr Sands said:
If your business has a special offer on, it’s hard to get people to come, but if 40 businesses all have a special offer on, loads of people come into town.
Totally Locally's 'Declaration of Independents'.
In 2019, they held the first ever Fiver Festival, when local businesses offered high-quality bargains and signposted customers to other participating businesses. Now, more than 100 towns regularly hold such events.
Mr Sands said:
It created a real buzz in the towns that did it. One town reported a 40% increase in footfall.
Taking into account the effects of post-covid inflation, the team relaunched the idea under the banner Magic Tenner Towns. Last year, 74 towns across the UK became Magic Tenner Towns.
Mr Sands said:
When people come into town, the average number of businesses they use is three. This is all about bringing people into the town and helping them to discover what’s there.
Totally Locally also provides a wide range of resources – usually in the form of posters, flyers and maps – that participating towns can print out free of charge.
One poster says “If you liked this shop, we think you’ll also like....”, with a space left for the business-owner to fill in the names of their own favourite local shops – an idea Mr Sands said they stole from Amazon.
One of the free posters downloadable from Totally Locally's website.
Diverting customers’ spending away from the likes of Amazon and the high-street multiples is one of the main aims of the initiative.
The main thrust of Totally Locally’s work will come to fruition in October – traditionally one of the slowest times of the year for traders.
It has not yet been decided what form the project will take, but there was enthusiasm at last night’s meeting for the Magic Tenner Towns initiative.
The £39,000 from the High Street fund will cover Mr Sands’ and Mr Waldren’s wages, as well as social media and photography costs.
Totally Locally became involved with Knaresborough at the behest of the Knaresborough Business Collective, which is run by local traders Natalie Horner and Annie Wilkinson-Gill.
They liked the firm’s approach, not least because they had a similar style of operating. When Totally Locally hold a meeting, there is no agenda and no minutes taken. The motto is simply: Be nice or leave.
Mr Sands added:
And we don’t talk about parking – there's no point. You can spend hours talking about it and not a lot changes, so we focus on other things.
Ms Horner, of Knaresborough printing firm Sid Horner & Son, told the Stray Ferret:
Everything Totally Locally did just resonated with us. Me and Annie have had our businesses for 15 years, and the town’s changed tremendously in that time, and there didn’t seem to be a place for the modern business and the modern business-owner. They didn’t want to sit through a two-hour-long agenda and not be able to speak.
We have more of a free-flow approach, where everyone can get involved, and we do what people want to do.
We ask people’s opinions. We include everybody and ask what they want for the town, and then we do it. We don’t spend months doing surveys and building up to actually doing something – we just go about doing it.
Mr Sands added:
It’s about just doing it – there's no permission needed. Once people start doing things for themselves, and for each other, amazing things happen. We call it the Economics of Being Nice.
What we’ve learned is that you can do anything if the community is on your side.
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