The Caledon Business Innovation Zone, or CBIZ as it is commonly referred to, is a section of the local government dedicated to assisting local entrepreneurs in order to boost the town’s economy. They had only just begun to advertise their services and they needed to develop a social media plan and strategy. This real-life client partnered with my Social Media class at Humber to work in small groups to develop a digital strategy. The members of the town of Caledon would then vote on which groups were the best and the top three would receive cash prizes.
We want to present a clear and thorough social strategy to CBIZ and place in the class competition.
We will conduct research in the form of a social media audit of CBIZ’s competitors to gain a better understanding of their market. This also will allow us to see how CBIZ’s existing social media compared and, therefore, where the areas of improvement were. We will then use that information to inform our plan.
In order to do this, we will need to collaborate as a group through regular meetings to divide our workload and discuss our research results. From there, we can brainstorm content ideas and design content using the Adobe Creative Suite.
After doing some general research on social media, we found that CBIZ’s target audience was mainly attracted to Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn which is where we chose to focus our efforts. We then developed a social media calendar which provided a timeline of how often we felt CBIZ should be posting and holding events at their space.
This initial planning then allowed us to branch out and create a variety of different social posts, videos, blog posts, and ad words which CBIZ could use throughout their campaign. I personally created three short videos using CBIZ’s provided sketches of different materials and objects related to business. These were created in After Effects with the use of keyframes and masks to create a seamless flow between the graphics. The mockups were created using AdParlor with the designs and copy that we brainstormed and created within our group.
My group and I pitched our campaign to a panel of members from the town of Caledon (including the mayor!) and faculty from our program. Our campaign ended up placing third overall, meaning we also received a cash prize for our efforts! Sadly, CBIZ never ended up putting any of the plans into action so there are no applicational results to report on but it was a win that our teamwork and plan were appreciated by the organization.
