A new website to help boost local businesses in the run-up to Christmas has been launched by three NI entrepreneurs, with the help of Esri Ireland.
TheBigNIMarket went live last Tuesday and is the brainchild of the hugely popular ‘Northern Ireland Business’ Facebook page founder, Tim McKane, former Digital Transformation Director, Trevor Steenson and Business Advisor Michael Osborne.
The website showcases small businesses across NI, to help them market their offerings in time for Christmas shopping.
It is split into sectors such as “Health and Wellbeing” and “Food and Drink”, so potential shoppers can browse these categories or simply ‘look local’ and find the businesses that are closest to them.
Co-founder Tim McKane told Sync NI, “Trevor was Digital Transformation Director for the Northern Ireland Civil Service, with a wealth of experience seeing projects from inception through to delivery, Michael has a lot of experience in membership organisations and I developed the marketing and content side.”
When Tim started the Northern Ireland Business Facebook group, which now has over 17,000 active members that help one another promote their local livelihoods across NI, he asked Rachel Steenson to help by making a map that could showcase the country’s small businesses and their whereabouts.
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Rachel is the NI Market Engagement Manager for Esri Ireland, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists.
“Rachel showed me an Esri application called a storymap which she had configured with some of the Facebook businesses,” Tim explained.
In developing TheBIGNIMarket, he said: “We thought it was a real opportunity to do something different. It’s not meant to replicate or compete with Google or other social media, where customers search for a particular business. It’s an entirely new experience based on locality and browsing to discover something new.
“It’s more of a shopping experience than that provided by a normal online search. It’s a bit like going to a shopping centre and turning around, seeing and finding all the different shops.”
Through Facebook, the advertising for TheBIGNIMarket site has already had 67,000 impressions reaching 43,000 people in less than five days.
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Tim continued: “We’ve had 1,500 unique link clicks just from the advertising, so that’s 1,500 visitors in five days.”
So far over 290 businesses have signed up to be part of TheBigNIMarket at the time of this publication, and you can find out how to join here.
The team plan to broaden the site’s footprint in January also, to include a wider range of business and services.
Tim said, “People are coming onto the ‘Northern Ireland Business’ Facebook page and asking if there’s anybody who can provide website development for example and they’re getting maybe 80 or 90 responses.
“That can be a double-edged sword because it’s almost too many for somebody to be able to choose from. So if those businesses join TheBIGNIMarket IT sector, people can look there, see all the local businesses that deliver those services and it will make it much easier for people to select the business that best suits them”.
“I’ve always talked about ‘audience first’ marketing and thinking about the end user. I think that’s what we have in theBIGNIMarket. It’s very user friendly.”
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Tim praised Esri’s technology platform as the entire site has been developed using the firm’s tech, including the various mapping pages and the survey businesses fill out in order to be listed on the site.
“If I hadn’t met Rachel and got to know what Esri technology can do, this wouldn’t exist. It’s a great example of what the visibility of software can do. It sparks ideas.
“At the moment we are funding the marketing costs ourselves to help our local businesses, many of which have been hugely impacted by COVID-19”.
“TheBIGNIMarket provides an opportunity to work in a much more co-operative way, using a budget to market collectively can be much more effective than small businesses trying to do it individually”.
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Rachel Steenson added: “From Esri Ireland’s point of view we’ve always believed in the importance of location and understanding where something happens.
“This year Covid-19 has put a spotlight on just how important location can be. Working with Tim and the team on the Northern Ireland Business Facebook Group was my small way of helping local businesses in Northern Ireland”.
“Throughout the pandemic I have tried to support local as much as possible. And it is great to see that using Esri technology on TheBIGNIMarket website I can view local businesses near my home that I wasn’t aware of before.”
Visit TheBIGNIMarket and find out more here.
