City working on unified marketing plan

In an effort to establish an integrated, unified marketing plan for Newton, city council approved plans to bring the city and its stakeholders together with an outside marketing firm to begin work on a new approach for the community. Happy Medium, of Des Moines, was selected to provide marketing services in hopes of establishing a more cohesive look for the city to those searching it out.

“City council identified the desire for marketing across agencies that is more targeted, uses more consistent messaging and is a more efficient use of city resources, especially in a way that can be measurable,” said city director of finance and development Bryan Friedman. “City staff worked to develop a path forward to enable the community to have a more integrated marketing presence.”

Happy Medium has three objectives for working with the city including conducting a website analysis of six city of Newton websites, conducting a discovery process with the city team and other key stakeholders, including the Convention and Visitors Bureau, Newton Development Corporation, Newton Housing Development Corporation and Newton Main Street and developing an action plan for the city to be used in implementing the existing branding and new branding guidelines document across all stakeholder groups.

“The path forward at this point includes a proposal to analyze the current marketing being done, especially through websites. The city has our city of Newton government website but also the Get to Know Newton website, figuring out how that really establishes a presence in the world in conjunction with all of the other websites that market our community,” Friedman said.

For website analysis, Happy Medium will work with the city to analyze its web presence on the basis of mobile friendliness, page speed, content, general branding and organization as they relate to visitors, developers, residents and new residents of Newton. From there, the marketing firm will provide suggestions for improvement and updates based on their analysis.

“I know the key to marketing the community of Newton starts on the web. That’s where people are going first to get information whether they are a business, developer, visitor or someone that is looking to relocate to a new community or even our own citizens. I think we have an opportunity here to do even better service for our citizens that are here,” councilwoman Evelyn George said.

Further marketing efforts in Newton include Happy Medium conducting in-person meeting with team members and stakeholders groups. In the meetings, Happy Medium will discuss the organization’s history, public perceptions, strengths, internal and external challenges, competition and goals, existing branding, marketing plans, goals and difficulties.

Following those meetings, Happy Medium will map out how the branding implementation process will work, specifically how best to use the existing branding most effectively through marketing efforts. They will then meeting with all stakeholders as a whole and individually to answer any questions, get additional information and develop a comprehensive action plan.

Using all information gathered, Happy Medium will develop an action plan for Newton that will outline future and ongoing branding integration efforts. It will include deliverables, a timeline and cost.

The total cost for the discovery, analysis and action plan process by Happy Medium is $7,000 with funds coming from marketing services line items in TIF budgets and the housing initiative. No clear timeline for the process has been set, but the city is planning to more aggressively on the project and hopes to have feedback by spring.

“When people search there first mode to find something out about the community, they are going to the web. They need to be able to find you immediately,” Councilman Craig Trotter said. “This makes sense. I’m excited and I think this will be fantastic.”

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com