The Marketing Guy were really pleased to design a website, and run three social channels for Oldham Parish Church to enable them to run a virtual Christmas Tree Festival.
Traditionally, the Christmas Tree festival will see 65 trees all decorated by local businesses, charities and organisations lining the church with each tree lovingly decorated by a representative from that organization. The festival runs all December and creates a festive event that brings the people of Oldham together. It would be a real shame if it couldn’t take place.
Although nothing was going to take the place of actually seeing, feeling and smelling the real Christmas trees in the church, The Marketing Guy was able to find a way bring the Christmas trees to the community.
The first thing that we did was to create a website, opchristmastree.co.uk, to host a tree for each sponsor, this gave us the space promote each sponsor’s organization and link through to their social media channels. The second thing that we did was to create the festival it’s own social media account on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, from this platform and using local community hashtags like #Oldhamhour we were able to show each sponsors Christmas tree throughout advent. For existing sponsors we took their historical trees and pushed those through our social channels but for new businesses we took advantage of the generous offer from Gareth Wright at GW Design (no relation), www.garethwrightdesign.co.uk to create virtual Christmas trees like the one below to promote their businesses.
From a standing start the reach that we were able generate on Twitter and Facebook especially was really encouraging with each Facebook post having an average reach of 391 people per post. The comments and links that we received at well as the number of private messages on Facebook were a real positive.
As well as the interactions there were also several other positives to the campaign. Five new businesses signed up to the Festival in 2020 which will lead to greater income in 2021 for the festival. The second thing is that the virtual festival has given greater appeal to the traditional festival in 2021. Now as well as the Christmas tree in the building the sponsors will also get a page on the website and will have their tree shared on social media.
Bring on Christmas 2021.