Two Year Campaign: Community Spirit and Business Strength
2-Year Campaign
Sustained Community Strategy
#ThankYouSurrey
Year 1 Campaign Platform
6,000+
Business Network Contacts
69%
YoY Facebook Reach Increase
The Challenge
The Surrey Board of Trade connects over 6,000 business contacts and 60,000 local, regional and international professionals, supporting economic opportunity, workforce development, advocacy and business growth across Surrey. But in 2021, a year into the global pandemic, Surrey businesses were feeling the full weight of health restrictions and reduced foot traffic. Generic "buy local" messaging was starting to feel exhausted, consumers were tuning out. SBOT needed a campaign that would move people, not just remind them.
The Approach
Rather than telling people to shop local, our team built a campaign that made them feel why it mattered. Two strategic approaches anchored Year 1: showing genuine gratitude, depicting the real impact that community support had on Surrey business owners' lives, and demonstrating social and economic impact through the tangible ways SBOT members were helping residents navigate the pandemic. The campaign platform, #ThankYouSurrey, became the connective thread. Six local businesses were profiled over consecutive weeks, each story told through high-production hero video and organic social posts. The content put human faces on the Surrey business community, real stories, real stress, real gratitude, and gave consumers a reason to care. Year 2 built on that foundation, expanding the campaign scope and amplifying what had proven to resonate.
The Results
The campaign generated significant community engagement and drove meaningful growth in SBOT's social following. Authentic storytelling outperformed traditional promotional messaging at every level, and the results over Year 1 were strong enough that SBOT returned to expand and evolve the campaign into a second year. The multi-year engagement demonstrated the compounding power of trust-based community marketing: when businesses stop asking people to act and start giving them a reason to care, the community responds.