“When I joined the EC I became aware that I needed to raise both my personal and my business profile in my local town, Market Harborough. Whilst I grew up in South Leicestershire, I moved away in the mid 1990s and only returned when I set up my business consultancy. I needed to let people know who I was.
I raised my profile
“An opportunity along similar lines soon presented itself. I had the opportunity to change the name of my town and massively raise my profile at the same time. ‘Compare the Market’ have a character that we all know (love him or hate him), Alexsandr the Meerkat. Alexsandr has a fictional home of Meerkovo and was looking for a twin town in the UK. Market (or should I say) Meerkat Harborough, seemed an ideal candidate! I decided I would get behind this campaign and use it to raise my profile in the town. I quickly created www.meerkatharborough.com and we got visitors from as far away as Australia and Spain (I know this from both comments left and Google Analytics).
2,000 likes on Facebook
“A Facebook page was created to raise awareness of the campaign and we attracted over 2000 likes (1/4 of the population of the town).I gave radio interviews with local and regional radio and made an appearance on Gem 106’s Breakfast show with Sam and Amy. I was also interviewed by the BBC. When we were shortlisted to the final five towns and the campaign went to a public Facebook vote, we went into overdrive and created a viral video (in which I starred as a corrupt mayor) based in 1911. We persuaded our local mayor to appear in the video and gained huge publicity from this.
We even changed road signs
“Eventually we won with 70% of the National Vote. The local council were persuaded to let us change the road signs in the town from Market Harborough to Meerkat Harborough. We raised £5,000 for local charitable causes and I am now affectionately greeted by complete strangers who call me “Mr Meerkat”. It has raised my profile immensely. I was humbled to be awarded a Pride in Harborough award at a prestigious black tie dinner for “Raising the profile of the Town”
Busy implementing
“In addition to all of this I have been busy implementing an amazing amount of things in my business and here’s just a few of them:
- I’ve implemented a long form copy sales letter which is generating a 10% response rate. I give away free iPods with Ts&Cs and these come branded with my website address and loaded with a podcast introducing my other services and driving traffic to my website;
- I have completely changed my website www.tlcconsulting.co.uk to a Kajabi-based free membership site. Visitors are greeted by a squeeze page with basic contact information and a video introducing myself and my business, explaining briefly the benefits of using my business and inviting visitors to access my free video based site packed with tools, downloads and video guides designed to benefit their business. This forces visitors to give me their contact details which helps populate my email marketing list. On the site I have webinars, tutorials and even TLC TV (wonder where I got that idea from?!) – Whenever a new video is uploaded subscribers are emailed to drive them back to the site.
- I have had extensive success with a number of consultancy clients – I act for a greetings card publisher and have drafted deals recently with Funky Pigeon (getting my client loads of free TV publicity) and presently acting on a deal with the brother of a rather famous lady who married a Prince.”
