Two years ago Roman Road was digitally invisible. A search on the web returned zero results and there wasn’t even a wikipedia entry.
Our digital content and marketing strategy has put Roman Road on the digital map with first page rankings for Roman Road London, Roman Road Market and Roman Road Festival.
Web Search: First page ranking
The Roman Road LDN website helps people find vital information about Roman Road, its market, its shops and how to get there. We also publish ‘editorial’ stories about local events, local heritage, local arts and culture and local heroes too.
This collection of high-quality, well-optimised, authoritative and unique content about Roman Road has helped us rank first page on search result pages for key terms. We now receive on average 4,000 unique users a month, and more during big events.
The result is a website that not only creates a sense of community and preserves our culture, but it is a powerful marketing tool that raises Roman Road’s profile and attracts new visitors to the road. this benefits each and every local business.
Image Search: positive imagery
We use best practice image optimisation on the Roman Road LDN website to ensure that every single image will rank highly in Internet image searches. Enabling this bank of positive imagery to be highly visible online helps improve public perception of the road and helps attract new visitors.
Two years ago Roman Road was digitally invisible. A search on the web returned zero results and there wasn’t even a wikipedia entry. Our digital content and marketing strategy has put Roman Road on the digital map with first page rankings for Roman Road London, Roman Road Market and Roman Road Festival.
Growing our online community
Our social media platforms are an important way of connecting people and creating a sense of community and civic pride. They are also an effective way to support our local businesses, artists, community groups and crafters. Twitter in particular is an effective way of finding local talent to feature at our festivals.
Our Facebook and Twitter accounts have grown 10-12% annually. By far the most popular platform is an unbranded, but carefully managed Facebook group called Living in Bow. This group encourages local people to share memories and photos of the area. The group relies entirely on member contributions and its rapid growth is testimoney to a significant sense of ownership and community.
Increasing organic traffic
Our website is an important tool for amplifying our work and raising the profile of Roman Road’s heritage, arts and culture, and local businesses, all vital for the regeneration of our community. Organic traffic (from Internet search) offers the best return on investment so we invest in best practice SEO and content strategy. This ensures our online work has a lifespan that outlives the short life of social media posts. It’s also the best way to reach out to new users and visitors.
Instagram: most loved by businesses
Instagram is important for generating and disseminating beautiful photography of Roman Road and the products sold by local businesses. We create our own Instagram shots and we also repost the best Instagram shots taken by local businesses, residents and shoppers. We further amplify this by tweeting Instagram posts on Twitter to our 4,000+ followers. Instagram is the most popular form of social media used by Roman Road’s local businesses.
Twitter: powerful amplification
Twitter helps us amplify all our content, whether from social media or the website. We also retweet all tweets from local businesses. With over 4,000 followers @RomanRoadLDN offers powerful and free marketing support.
Supporting a digital high street
We support a digital high street. It’s an affordable and powerful tool for marketing and publicity; it helps create a sense of identify and place, and it can provide micro SMEs with e-commerce solutions without big outlay.
We aim to grow our own high street digital platforms to better market Roman Road and its businesses. We also aim to encourage and help local businesses, shops and market traders to go online themselves.Thanks to the buzz we have created online in the last two years, the number of local businesses now online has increased.
We plan to offer free drop-in digital clinics to all local businesses to help get them online.