DID's marketing effort progresses

A two-tiered marketing approach for the city organized by the Downtown Improvement District is making strides.

At the third marketing meeting held Wednesday, Sept. 21, at the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau, city leaders, downtown partnerships and business owners provided updates for both short-term and long-term marketing approaches.

In the short-term, the group plans to create a new collaborative downtown brochure that will be paid for with grant dollars and advertising from local businesses. The brochure already has 17 completed pages and a $10,000 contribution from the DID.

The brochure will become the universal guide for downtown, and the Downtown Sarasota Alliance is doubling the number of copies that it printed of last year’s brochure, from 50,000 to 100,000.

Other short-term goals include ramping up a downtown social media effort and creating a downtown ambassador program, in which people wearing uniforms could help direct visitors looking for places to shop and eat.

The long-term approach calls for a comprehensive research effort from the city of Sarasota, Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce and the SCVB.

SCVB President Virginia Haley said she will begin coordinating a research effort to send out a mass survey of residents to find out where they like to go downtown.

“We currently don’t have a good sense of (where) full-time residents, regional residents and people who work downtown (like to go),” Haley said. “We need to find partners to drive members to fill out an online survey abut their perceptions of downtown.”

Haley recommends a future roundtable discussion with residents to talk about where they want to go downtown.

“We will have to distribute surveys on different days and at different events, randomly, over a two-month period to get a variety of downtown responses,” Haley said.

The Sarasota Farmers Market also has plans to perform its own survey.

Officials believe the $2,500 the DID and other organizations spent on an editorial advertisement section that debuts in next month’s US Airways magazine will also pay dividends.

Haley reported the combined effort by the region has led to 52 pages’ worth of advertising for the area in the magazine.

The groups will meet again at 9 a.m. Oct. 26, at City Hall, 1565 First St., Sarasota, to discuss how their marketing efforts are progressing.

BRANDING DOWNTOWN
• Partner jointly with other downtown organizations
• Create a new downtown brochure and magazine using joint marketing dollars
• Create co-op ads that would appear in national publications with the help of the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Create a farmers market kiosk at the Sarasota Farmers Market
• Form a downtown ambassador program with people in uniforms helping people navigate downtown