CAPC website gets makeover

513

City Advertising and Promotion Commission Executive Director Mike Maloney announced at the Feb. 8 meeting the eurekasprings.org website has a new look since publicist Gina Rambo simplified the experience and made it “fresh and clean.” The calendar is up-to-date and all businesses in town can have space of their own.

He mentioned businesses provide their own photos, hopefully recent ones, and load their own information onto the site. All posts are previewed before being added, and Maloney said they integrated all possible social media links onto the site. Rambo maintains a blog with comments about upcoming events, and Maloney said the revamped site would be a “great attribute to the 2017 season.”

Maloney also presented the CAPC’s media buys for 2017, which will be posted on the capc.biz site.

When discussing expanding the marketing egg as had been suggested, Maloney said he was okay with the concept, but had already configured the budget for placing ads, so now he would have to rearrange spending without busting his budget.

Commissioners had liked the expansion idea and still asked for a plan on how Maloney intended to find money in the budget for expanding marketing. He said he could at least try Facebook ads regardless of his other digital marketing.

However, after the meeting, Maloney sent an email to commissioners stating, “To let you all breathe a little easier, I realized I had made a decimal transposition error in the cost of our digital impressions.  Versus the ten cent per unit value we were discussing, the actual value is one penny per impression. Thus 225,000 impressions are not $22,500, rather $2,250.  Thus 1,000 impressions are $10, not $100.  For your information, that is the same rate for contextual and pre-roll video. I believe our budget is perfectly adequate and will allow us to accommodate the increased exposure easily.”

ESDN becomes MSES

Director Jacqueline Wolven announced her agency dropped the Downtown Network from its name and, through affiliation with Main Street Arkansas and Main Street America, and will be known as Main Street Eureka Springs.

She said her office surveyed 65,000 visitors and learned that Eureka Springs is not performing well at attracting the 35-55 age group. She will now focus on ways to pull in Gen-Xers.

Other items

  • Finance Director Rick Bright told commissioners that staff have identified appointment software called ACT which they intend to purchase for Sales Director Karen Pryor. Bright said the “pretty robust system” would allow Pryor to input data during an interview. Her information would be available to both the CAPC office and the Chamber. A lodging property could log on to check for leads, and the CAPC could see a list of who signed in.
  • Maloney stated Keisha Doss of 121-Digital would attend the Feb. 22 workshop to answer questions about what 121-Digital does for the CAPC.
  • He also noted that statistics indicate Eureka Springs received $162,000 worth of free media in 20 different states from Jan. 7 through Feb. 7.

Next workshop will be Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m., at the CAPC office and the next regular meeting will be Wednesday, March 8, at 6 p.m.

1 COMMENT

  1. Explaining what exactly comprised the “free” media, might be a little more responsible in accountability, rather in a generalization. The amount could be attributed to one article or several different means of communication. I believe substance of the facts is important, as well as the sources. Thank you.

Comments are closed.