The City of Elliot Lake has learned to accomplish a lot with very little.
The northeastern Ontario municipality won a national marketing award in the under $200,000 budget category at the Economic Developers Association of Canada's (EDCO) annual conference in Vancouver, Sept. 24.
The former uranium mining town, which has blossomed into a thriving retirement and cottage living community, was recognized for a series of print ads in the city's image renewal campaign. Elliot Lake had won an earlier provincial economic development marketing award for the same campaign.
“We don't use the word 'brand' too much,” said Daniel Gagnon, director of economic development. “We already have a brand and that's retirement.”
But in recent years, the city has wanted to cast a wider net by attracting cottagers with their lakeside lot developments, as well as snowmobile and ATV tourists.
“We wanted to get the message out that we're family friendly and we wanted to use more youthful images,” said Gagnon.
The campaign's objective was to present Elliot Lake as a full-service city with a top-notch quality of life for all ages. The target audience was families and financially stable adults with outdoor pursuits. Vacation travel close to home was also a consideration.
The print ads run in generic and specialty outdoor publications.
The city enlisted Lucidia Ltd, a Sault Ste. Marie advertising agency, to help them come up with a new versatile logo and ad campaign.
It's not the first time Elliot Lake has marketed itself on the cheap.
Because of a recent wave of cottage lot construction, the city needed to address a skilled labour shortage.
They launched a job search strategy using some non-traditional advertising methods. The city spent $2,500 to buy a few weeks of TV airtime in northeastern Ontario but also used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to do their marketing for them.
“It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, since they've been promoting this at these (EDCO) conferences for years,” said Gagnon. “You've got to do what you can with the dollars that you have.”
The city's marketing budget amounts to a modest $70,000 annually.
At the same EDCO event, two northwestern Ontario municipalities also came home with national marketing awards.
Tourism Thunder Bay grabbed two awards including one for a campaign called Seven Days With the Giant, a postcard teaser intended to attract outdoor adventure seeks to the area. The second award went for their monthly tourism e-newsletter on upcoming events and hotel packages.
“Tourism Thunder Bay is proud to be a leader in effectively utilizing web based media tools to promote the city and integrating them with unique print media programs to extend the reach of our message through a wider range of tourism partners” said Paul Pepe, tourism manager, on his tourism blog page.
“Receiving these two EDAC marketing awards is an honour and to be recognized by our economic development peers across Canada is the result of an extensive collaborative partnership involving our many tourism industry partners, Generator Advertising and the team at Tourism Thunder Bay.”
The Dryden Development Corporation was recognized with the award of Best of Category for its Dryden Tourism Development and Marketing Strategy.
Their Experience Dryden strategy was created to respond to changing tourism market trends. It is a collaboration between the city's economic development department, tourism partners and the consulting firms of McSweeney & Associates and TD Graham & Associates.
The strategy lays out ways to promote the area by creating new products with development of their waterfront, sports and convention tourism, business travel, arts and culture, trails and water routes, and guided area tours.
“We are very pleased that Dryden's first tourism development and marketing strategy has been recognized by its peers,” said Janet Pilozow, chairwoman of the Dryden Development Corporation who praised the “forward thinking” work of the corporation in helping grow the tourism economy.
