Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have a unique role in revitalising and promoting local commercial areas – driving business support, community engagement, and much-needed exposure to the many businesses involved.
Since they are such a niche arena to work in, with potentially vast numbers of businesses within a single BID, marketing can often pose an interesting challenge.
If you are struggling to know where to start with promoting your Business Improvement District, you’re not alone. We’ve put together this handy guide to help you navigate BID marketing more easily – complete with some of our own tried and trusted ideas to get you started.
What is a BID?
A BID is a partnership between local businesses that work together to improve their area, funded by a levy on the eligible organisations.
The levy is used to pay for projects and services that have been agreed by ballot, such as events, promotions, marketing, and assistance with issues affecting their trading area.
The average size of a BID is around 300 – 400 hereditaments (levy-paying businesses), although they can be as small as 50 or as large as 1,000+.
With so many businesses operating within a BID, it can be difficult to know how to effectively manage your marketing activity and ensure that every levy-payer gets the exposure they deserve.
But fear not.
Using our extensive expertise of BID marketing, we’ve devised a foolproof system to keep the businesses happy and ensure that they all get maximum love across the course of a year.
How does BID marketing work?
There are two key elements to a BID that need to be addressed for a successful marketing strategy – direct customers, and indirect customers.
Direct customers – the levy-paying businesses
The B2B element of a BID marketing campaign focuses on the businesses within the levy.
Keeping over 400 or so businesses happy with equal opportunity for promotion can seem like a daunting challenge. However, the first step to managing this is to ensure you have a full and complete list of every business within the BID.
This then allows you to create a ‘database’ that you can work from. Within the biggest BID that we work with, we commit to sharing every business on socials at least four times a year and using our spreadsheet, we can track who we’ve promoted and when.
Although this system may seem simple, with so many moving parts, it’s vital to manage it day-to-day to ensure that everything runs smoothy. In our example above, we have to actively post a minimum of three times a day to enable everyone a fair slot – which can be a lot of additional work.
Another way to support the businesses within the BID is to build an email list for quick and easy communication. This is excellent when needing to share important information that impacts the local area, as well as seeking engagement with promotions or events that you plan to run.
We also recommend holding weekly marketing meetings, giving levy-payers another opportunity to become involved in future plans and activities.
Indirect customers – the customers of those businesses
Although increasing customers and footfall into the local area are technically one of the main end-goals of a BID, these are actually the indirect customers of your marketing efforts.
However, they are equally as important as the businesses you work with – and reaching them on behalf of the BID members is critical to success.
Building unique campaigns and events around the variety of businesses within the area is one core element, alongside the regular drumbeat of promotion on social media.
Again, we would also highly recommend building an email list for the BID that reaches end customers, meaning any local activities, events or special offers can be shared into their inbox. For example, in the last 12 months alone, we’ve grown one of our biggest BID email databases by 2000 subscribers – expanding the opportunity for a large number of businesses to directly reach a highly engaged audience.
Tried and tested BID marketing ideas
There are many different ways gain exposure for the wide variety of levy-payers within your BID.
The first step is always getting to know your direct customers – the businesses themselves – and identifying what they need from your marketing efforts, whether it be increased footfall, visibility or engagement.
From hosting exciting seasonal events such as Christmas attractions in the heart of your BID area, to running Back to School campaigns driving customers to local clothing and stationary shops, taking advantage of key dates and holidays are an excellent way to kickstart your marketing plan.
Alongside the carefully coordinated social media campaign that we run throughout the year, we also work closely with our BID teams to come up with new and innovative events and festivals that drive traffic to the area and increase engagement with the businesses we serve.
For example, in 2024 we hosted a number of campaigns in Coventry City Centre, such as:
Streets of Cov
‘Streets of Cov’ was a city-wide arts festival offering a free and unforgettable outdoor celebration featuring world-class acts over the course of six weekends in the summer.
It was a phenomenal success – drawing both locals and tourists into the city at a time that’s usually incredibly quiet. Our paid marketing campaign saw over 818k total social media impressions over the six weeks, and we recorded over 10,000 people in attendance.
Cocktail Week
At the start of September 2024, we hosted the first ever Coventry Cocktail Week, a city-wide cocktail event that allowed people to purchase a wristband to enjoy £5 cocktails and food discounts at bars, restaurants & clubs throughout the city.
With over 30 businesses taking part – including local retailers – the event was a fantastic opportunity to help support the hard-working hospitality businesses in Coventry, while enjoying delicious, discounted cocktails.
Another great success with over 3000 wristbands sold and £291,250 of direct economic impact generated.
Independent Business Project
To promote smaller BID businesses, we ran an Independent Business Project in July to coincide with National Independents Day on 4th July.
This involved creating appealing window decals, marketing boards and visiting the premises to actively take promotional pictures for our social media campaign. The idea was to encourage customers to shop local – increasing visibility for around 100 smaller levy-payers.
The project was well received by levy-payers and plans are already underway for a 2025 project.
How can we help your BID?
While we can happily share lots of ideas for marketing BIDs successfully, we know that the size and scale of them can still present a unique challenge to BID managers.
If you need additional support in ensuring that the businesses within your BID truly get the love and promotion that they deserve, Piece of Cake Marketing is here to help. From a one-off session to refine your marketing strategy, to managing the marketing process end-to-end, we are able to support in any way that’s right for you.
In fact, our very own Operations Director, Kate Keene, was recently awarded a certificate in BID marketing from British BIDs – so you can be sure that when you work with us, your Business Improvement District is in safe and knowledgeable hands.
Drop us an email at hello@pieceofcakemarketing.co.uk to chat through your options and find out how we can use our extensive experience to elevate your BID marketing plan today.