How Covent Garden is beating the recession

Many High Streets have gaps where shops and businesses used to be.   Hit by falling visitor numbers and reduced clients, there is an air of abandonment.

But have you been to London’s Covent Garden lately? If so, be surprised at how busy the area is.   The unique variety of fashion shops, restaurants, bars & pubs, and the services that assist them are all busy.   No unsightly gaps.   There are many far sighted entrepreneurs in Covent Garden, but even so, to have been affected rather less than the rest of UK PLC is really quite special.

How is this being achieved?

I recently visited In and Around Covent Garden, the membership organisation dedicated to promoting Covent Garden area and turned up a thoroughly interesting story.

They are a highly communicative team, who deeply involve their shop and business members in community activities.   Their website is an effective advertising portal that members add their profiles to, with visits to the members tracked from the site.

Members are regularly covered in the monthly magazine, both printed and online.   There are frequent networking events, with venues queuing up to host them.   Everything is promoted using eMail marketing, and more recently, they are experimenting with Twitter.

Members are conscious that a good online presence pays.   Many support a number of Covent Garden advertising outlets to ensure they are internationally visible (type ‘covent garden’ into Google.com to see.)

Now this is the point.

With shop vacancies only around 1% compared to West End vacancies of 13% according to JPCR, (see http://ow.ly/1pm61), the activity has come about in large part because organisation and members have encouraged innovative ideas, and maintained their spend, particularly on the following 7 marketing activities:

• PR
• eMail Marketing
• Visible Websites
• Networking
• Online Advertising
• Events advertising
• Some Social Media Marketing, with lots of untapped possibilities here.

And this is the story of how Covent Garden beat the recession.

What are Your marketing decisions for the next 90 days?

As the recession starts to lift, it is particularly now that marketing and advertising has its biggest effect. So here’s a vital question to consider today. What marketing programs is your business now assembling to expanding your market share, so you can replicate the Covent Garden success story?

Because whatever you decide today will make a significant impact on your revenues in June. As it will Covent Garden, and they have already decided what they are doing…

Chris Clark

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Chris Clark is MD of Clark Marketing, a digital marketing company focussing on keeping clients’ shops full, getting the Hillingdon Mayor to see two of our success stories for herself, turning £5-figure e-commerce site sales to £6 figure, and more.  Chris has just completed his diploma in interactive and direct marketing for the IDM at Kings College, London, and was the oldest one on the course!

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