High Streets Task Force webinar on Place Sentiment

Foreign.

Oh, sorry, Polly. Same time.

Good afternoon, everybody. Sarah, great to see you and great to see so many of you joining the webinar today. And we'll give everybody a couple of minutes. We've got a, I think almost a record crowd today.

Um, we have, we've got over 100 and. 110 registered for today, which is really exciting.

Fantastic. Those of you don't know us, I'm Polly Barnfield, I'm CEO and founder of maybe and Sarah with us, who is our Head of Growth and very much is the spearheads at all of the work we do with local authorities across the uk. Sarah's also manning chat, so if you've got any questions, pop them in there and we'll just give everybody a moment or two to settle down. I apologize for any background noise because I'm in a very salubrious Kentucky Fried Chicken on my way back up the M40. So, yes, remote work, it's great. Right, we'd be lovely if you just drop to chat where you all are and if you're anywhere in particularly extraordinary. Right now, this webinar is being delivered on behalf of the High Street Task Force and it's been delivered by Mabie, who are a partner of the High Street Task Force. So how are we doing on time? We'll give everybody another minute just to come in and get the bearings. But while you, as you arrive, if you please, use the chat and let us know where you're from. That'd be lovely and we will get started in a moment. But we've got quite a good, quite a good number of people joining us today. Sarah, does it look like we've got. Is chat functioning well for everybody?

Not seeing anybody in chat yet. It might be the Q A that we need to use sometimes. It can be a little bit, bit pesky and decide, you know, we're too high brow for chat and we have to use question and answers. But still people pouring in. So another 30 seconds to a minute, I think to let people to come in. That would be fabulous.

Brilliant.

There are a couple of Q&As.

Lots.

Brilliant. Hello, Lincoln. Hello, Wendy. Yeah, chat is disabled. Thanks, Jo. Brilliant. Okay. Yes, lots of people chat. Disabled. Well, I've no idea how to mend that, so let's use Q and A. That's marvellous. Hello Aylesbury and hello Loughborough.

Thank you everyone.

UK covered today, actually.

Brilliant. Great to see so many people here. Apologies, our Zoom account seems to have a habit of disabling chat at the last minute for us. So please do use the Q and A. And we will either answer the questions as we go through the webinar or follow up in person as well. So please, lots of questions in here would be amazing, amazing. And we will deal with them directly. Without further ado, we will crack on. So Sarah, you're in charge of the slides. This webinar delivered on behalf of the High Street Task Force. We're Polly and Sarah from maybe let's get going. So Sarah, this webinar today is focusing on how do you use footfall to measure a footfall as a measurement to validate the impact of local business support and how is this linked to place sentiment? You know, we live in this world now where digital and physical is beginning to blend and we're very intrigued in the way that you can measure local business support in a way that is relevant to how consumers behavior is shifting. What we're going to go through in this webinar is some case studies and some really interesting data that we've gathered around the delivery of local business support to over 25,000 businesses. If we could just give some context into who we are and what we do. So maybe collect the data from 3.9 million businesses every single day. And we process that. So we process all of the engagement around that content so we know what's working well for businesses and what isn't. We know who is doing what and where they're doing it. And it's like having your. It's like having your ear up against the wall with the glass. And it's fascinating what you can learn, isn't it Sarah? Quite extraordinary.

Oh yes. There's some amazing insights that we're going to be able to share with youths off to need as well.

And alongside that we also can regularly survey consumers and look at how they are using social media. Little spoiler alert, there's a bit of a gap, but we'll go into that more on that later as we go through this webinar. So our link with the High Street Task Force is that we provide also all of this data into the High Street Task Force Dashboard. If you're not yet using that, don't worry, you can also access it through maybe and there's even more depth within maybe itself. Everybody that's on this webinar has got the ability to access a Mabie account. So if you haven't yet got one, please do get in touch. And we're telling you what you get by default through the High Street Task Force. But we're really excited about working on the High Street Task Force and it set us on a journey where we're starting to really look at how social data, social media data can link to High street footfall. That link is made within the High Street Task Force Dashboard and we're going to go into it in much more detail today around some things that we have discovered during the quarter four of 2022 and we've just completed two very large evaluations for two UKCRF projects where as part of that evaluation we've done some, I think, first time ever evaluation of how footfall has impacted, have been impacted by social media activity. So if we, so if we just move to slide 5. This is the view of the High Street Task Force Dashboard that if you have have access to it, you can start to see some very top level data that's linked to any footfall data. But if you want any more detail, there's a whole plethora inside Mobia and we can provide you with access to accounts. So just giving some context to where we are, we did a big summary of consumer insights in 2022. So on slide six, Sarah, you can see that 79% of consumers now spend at least an hour down social media. So you might think, why is this crazy lady talking about footfall and social media in the same breath? Well, just stop and consider for a moment. Consumers are spending an increasing amount of time walking around with this device in their hand. We all do it right? And we had this theory that your phone is your wayfinder, it tells you where to go. And the challenge is that if businesses aren't present in that journey, they're frankly not present in a consumer's life. Now what the surveys that we're doing reveals is the amount of time that people are spending on social is going up and up and up. So in summer 2022, 79.1% of consumers are spending over seven hours a week on social media. That's more time per individual business, of individual consumer than the average business spends in a total week. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. More than 13% of people in the summer of last year spent more than five hours, five hours per day on social media. Now we reran this Data on slide 7 in December of last year and the number that absolutely jumped out was the 150% increase in the amount of time that consumers were spending on social media in that five hour gap in that five hour period. So there's 150% increase in the number of consumers that spending five hours a day on social media. You could argue that when it's dark at night, maybe people do it more, but whatever. 150% increase. 90% of consumers are likely to buy because of an ad they see on social media. 65% of consumers want to support indies via social media. And this is what we want to explore today. Across the UK, less than 19% of local businesses are active on social media. And in some areas, as we're going to show you, many don't even have a social media account. I'm going to dive into that data in a lot of detail. So moving on to slide 8. This is a snapshot of what we can do with data. So of the 3.9 million businesses across the UK that we listen to on a daily basis, we can slice that by their activity but also by their area. And this is a heat map showing the percentage of businesses that are active on social media. The red dots are the place that over 50% of businesses, and this is all businesses actually having a social media account. And as you can see, the majority of the country is in the lower percentages. So let's go into more detail, Sarah, and actually look, because this data is really, really extraordinary. Sarah's done an amazing job on pulling this data from our servers to reveal the percentages of businesses with social media on a town by town basis across various areas in the uk. And Sarah, I think you provided quite a lot of how many local authorities have had this data for SPF applications. If anybody hasn't or anybody wants it, what do they need to do to get this data?

Oh, I would have thought I've probably 95, maybe 100 local authorities already have access. All you need to do is ping me an email. I'm sarahabytech.com and I will be very happy to send you the data for your local, local authority area or any particular towns or cities that you're interested in.

Brilliant, thank you, Sarah. But as you can see, so at Mabie's heart, we've got the location of every business from Google my business. And you can see the scale of data. We've got the number of businesses in each area. So this is Scotland's data, but I think look at the number bottom right. Across Scotland, 15% of businesses have a social media account out of 175,000. Now you think of the disconnect between consumers in Scotland and again, I'm not picking everybody out here. So let's whizz down to Wales. In Wales, we have 137,000 businesses that we're tracking. And of those, only 13% have a social media account. If you come to Northern Ireland, we've got 86,000 businesses that we are tracking and of those, 22% have a social media account. Now, the really scary bit is that of that 22%, and the same for all of these other numbers here, about only 18% of those 18, 18% of those will not be posting on a regular basis. And it sounds incredible, but our ability as individuals to use social far exceeds our ability as businesses to use social media.

When I was pulling this data out of interest, 90%. I mean, bear in mind, this is data for independent SMEs as opposed to. So we've taken the nationals out of this picture, but less than 2% of businesses are active on social on a daily basis. That's pretty shocking. When I was pulling the data, I kind of guessed it might be 5, 6%, no, 2% look at north of England as well.

So the point is, this isn't regionalised. It's not, you know, the levelling up, aligning with the levelling up agenda. This is all across the uk, it's an endemic challenge of how you help businesses connect with customers who are becoming increasingly digital. So if we come down to West Midlands, Cambridge and Peterborough, 14%, 18%, you get the picture. Greater London, just under 20% of businesses with a social media account, and west of England, 20, Devon, 17. So the picture is not. It's a national problem wherever you are. So what I want to really, the focus of today is actually saying, well, you know, with local business support, if you decide to think, well, we want to deliver localised training or programs to fix what I believe is a growing problem, because consumers are choosing what to do through social channels and businesses not meeting there. How do you measure impact and how could you use this in the programs that you deliver? So we have, during 2022, provided over 25,000 businesses with access to social media tools and training. We. Lovely typo there. Sorry, apologies for that. And we've really scratched our heads about how you measure impact, because we appreciate that often you have to measure anything you deliver against jobs or jobs created or job safeguarded. And so the thing that we have really focused on is how do you measure the impact of local business support? And in this instance, obviously, we looked at it from a social media perspective and I'll actually talk you through the methodology that we use, which is very data led. So, moving to slide 18, the first approach we take is that we put a line on the map around a geographical area and say inside that area, all of these businesses are going to benefit from support. So that's how we ensure that we are delivering support to the right businesses. But that also provides us the geographical data of each business. Now, the bit that we have trialled in the last quarter of last year and what we've used for CRF evaluations is then overlaying onto this data the longitude and latitude of literally the front door of every business, which on slide 19, you can see this heat map beginning to appear. And this enables us to track, through GPS tracking on people's mobile phone, completely GDPR compliant, literally who the volume of customers moving into particular businesses. Now, that's not new. But what new here is we've started to then say, well, how do businesses that participate in training vary in footfall to those that do not participate in training? And so we can start to see a picture of the impact of delivering training to businesses. And something very, very interesting is beginning to emerge across a number of places where we've tested this. The blue line you can see is the town trend. So this just just to sort of clarify, please do ask questions in the Q and A here because this is sort of quite a big. It took me a moment, it took me a while to get my head around this, which is that what this data tracks is mobile phone data anonymized. So this is people with phones in their pockets is tracking, you know, when you, you say, yes, allow tracking on an app, it's tracking that, it's tracking individuals, but anonymized. So as I said, no gdpr. And it enables us to create a very realistic town trend. But then based upon where people go through business, literally front doors. And we've had a whole team mapping this, be able to say, have those people that have visited that town gone into businesses that are making more noise on social media than those that have not. And we keep checking this, but what we keep seeing is those businesses that are learning to be noisier get more footfall. You can see how at the beginning of the journey, everything starts in the same place. And as we start tracking it, you see the orange line vary from the gray line. And this is just to repeat. Blue line is the town trend. Grey line is businesses that are not participating in training. Orange line are businesses that are participating in training. Now, we had some very interesting head scratching to do around this as we started to evaluate this, which is obviously the footfall depends upon sector and I think in line with IPM and work, they did around types of town. This really bore that out as well because at Christmas some of the lines reversed but it depended on what type of business we were tracking. So just coming down to slide 21, there's been a lot of work looking at each individual business based upon their postcode to understand the outliers. But the massive variance is the only thing we can find that's different is the fact that they are using more social media than they did previously and it's breaking the trend of footfall in the place. Come on to slide 22. And again here this is looking at the variance for a particular town of the participating trend versus the town trend itself. And you can see again how businesses that are making more noise on social. We've got a 40% increase against the town trend as a whole. But again, interestingly apart from a few, you can see how the peaks and troughs still mirror. So the overall profile of the town, how people visit the town doesn't change. But what does change is the propensity of people to go into those businesses that are making more noise. I think it's an interesting concept, isn't it? But if you think about your use of social media and if you keep seeing something that beautiful sticky bun or that coffee that's steaming, I don't know about you but it makes you want to buy it. All of our survey Data says that 90% of people are more likely to see something they look at on social media. And for me this data really goes a long way to demonstrating that connection. Sarah, it's bringing that data to life. That's really interesting, isn't it?

Honestly, it was absolutely fascinating. We didn't know what the results were going to show and whether there was correlation. And then when the data started to come together it was like wow. Especially when we're all being asked to measure things that the impact of our projects against all these different metrics that have so many different factors that can affect them, direct project or not, to actually to be able to see that direct correlation is really, really exciting. We jumped around like jumping beans a lot when we saw these results, didn't we?

Oh boy. And just Sarah jump. So great question from Mandy. How do you get the GPS tracking from. So there are a number of providers that can supply this data. What's key is that how you then interpret it, it comes as sort of a fire hose of data. We work with visitor insights and we have another provider that helps us map it geospatially. But the the work is in being able to do this at scale and be able to then put the, all the businesses, identify all the businesses you're working with and be able to overlay the longitude and latitude of literally their front door. Because we've, whilst we've got the longitude and attitude that Google provides to us, we've discovered in many cases that's actually in the service yard or it's, you know, it's, it's, it's in the middle of the road and you literally need to put the longitude and latitude on the front door of the business because it tracks within three feet. And so you know for certain you're tracking people as they go through the door of that business. Because then I think it gives you a fairly solid piece of data that lets you say we can say how many people are going into these stores versus other stores. So if we just move to Slide 23, I hope, Mandy, that answers your question. If you look, please keep asking. And I think, let's just look at this for a second. As Sarah mentioned, the whole measurement piece, I believe that footfall leads to sales, which leads to jobs, which leads to economic growth, which leads to building community, has an impact on tourism. And fundamentally all of those things are about pride in place. Footfall equals people and people spend money. The second, from our perspective, we are now doing a large project where we are interviewing businesses to understand the impact on sales. But this I think is a really important metric around understanding that direct correlation between delivering a business intervention and the impact on football. And if anybody would like to understand more about the methodology, about how we do that, please do get in touch. We're very happy to share that because it's a lot of data crunching, but I think it gives you a really solid thing to point at. It's also made us think really long and hard about, well, what we've done here is measure the here and now and we've measured the direct impact of an intervention. But actually this thought process can be used historically, maybe as an example, have got the data back for a number of years and the people that we work with can also wind back time. So we have a time machine here. So if you move on to slide 24, if you have to do a feasibility study, for example, there's now the ability to say, well, you can use this theory to prove that theory if you like, you want to look back and say to us, for example, which businesses are really good on social already? Can I see whether actually their footfall is different from other businesses? You can build a time machine here and actually say, well, looking back, are those businesses that are already good at social having a disproportionate amount of our local, of our local footfall to other businesses? So before you make an investment in a local business support program, you can test some theories. Now really happy to have those conversations with people about how you could apply that to other sorts of local business support. But that concept of being able to, you know, the money everybody's got is precious and before you spend it, if you want to say, well can I test a theory? All of this data exists historically as well and I think that really intrigues us. So moving on to slide 25, it's also bringing that data to life. And so we're beginning to explore questions like, you know, where, where do the customers come from? Because the GPS data not only tracks across the, the threshold of a business, it also tracks back to where that mobile phone slept. Now just big caveat here it is anonymized so it doesn't provide the last four digits of a postcode, it is the top level data. So it provides you the ability to understand the area they came from. So we're working on a number of models at the moment which is a being able to understand well based upon support delivered. Does the town start to have a new catchment? Are you reaching a bigger area? Because those businesses messages going further. But actually that same thought process can be used in. We just. Sarah, you can complete a piece of work around town planning, you know, understanding how you can use this data to think, well, where are people coming from, which transport links they're using. And to the right of this graph is sociodemographic areas in the uk. So you can start to say, well we know people are coming from this area, what's the sociodemographic makeup of the area? How can we find other areas like that for example to reach. So what's really interesting is it provides a whole new set of tools to not only measure business, local business support, but also feasibility studies, but also think, well, how can we make our plans for the future based upon how the past is mapped out? We are super excited, excited about it. I'm very happy to share our learnings with anybody. Like to ask any questions. Am I making any sense there? It is quite strange delivering this from the kfc.

I have to say no making total sense. And you know, all of these different insights, especially when being looking at this tracking data around, you know, where are people coming from and you know, who are they and what, what are their, you know, what Are their. As an ideal customer, whether they're, are they, is it local traffic, is it regional traffic, is it, is it national or international traffic that's coming in? I mean, really interesting. And from where and why and on the back of what place making activity do we think, when we look at timelines and we think about all the different interventions we're all putting in place individually, what are the factors that we then can say we crikey, that worked or not sure if that worked because. And we know why it hasn't worked because wrong demographic or whatever piece of data it is. I mean, it's easy to get think, oh, I'll just layer another piece of data up top and another layer. You have to be quite careful about what is it you actually want to measure and why. But it is so exciting, all of this. Really exciting.

But what it comes back to is that that pure correlation between what your town is saying and the ability of businesses to in effect send out those, that send out those messages to attract customers is ultimately what will define the footfall of your place. And I think we've always had a very good hunch that was the case, but this data is really proving it and I think provides a very solid case for local business support to help businesses reach their customer via the channel where they're spending more time. So, moving to Slide 26.

Like you said, I've been working with a provider on a strategic master plan for a particular area in London and actually going back through all of that social media conversations related to those places, the conversation around what are their businesses saying and talking about, what are the stakeholders talking about, what are the community, you know, what's that correlation? It's really interesting to see how.

The.

Challenges that this particular area of London is facing is very, very much reflected in the current conversation and how with the support that we're going to be offering moving forward, how we can start driving that conversation, then seeing the impact that it makes and creating that pride in place and helping consumers. Seven hours a week on social media, the businesses and the places aren't talking to them.

Just want to answer a question from Fraser around another provider. Look, I can't answer that specifically. They possibly do. The key thing, Fraser, is to make sure that you've got the ability to pinpoint the longitude and latitude of a specific business. I'm very happy to take that question offline and go into more detail for you, happily. But the big message here is that whole business of measuring local business support. We believe footfall is a really Key driver of it, something that our High street task force put at the heart of what they do. But being able to link that whole social sentiment piece to the impact, as in footfall, which can then have an impact on jobs and safeguarding jobs, because more people equals more money, equals more transactions, I think is key. And the reason it's key is because if you look at the Christmas shopping data, 82% of people looked at social media for ideas on what to buy this Christmas. So if your local businesses are not in that channel, they're not going to make the sales. 46% of people said they use social media to more than they did last year to look at ideas on what to buy this Christmas. So, you know, I know I hate to talk about Christmas down January, but now is the time. It takes time to help these businesses do that. And the speed of change in the way consumers are behaving is evolving rapidly. 69% of consumers said they would look to interact with a business before purchasing a Christmas gift. Close to 70% of business of consumers want to engage with the business before even walking across their front door. So I think the impact that you can see on footfall is borne out by the rationale of this data because it is so important to us as individuals. So 28 is slide 28 looking at the hotspots across the UK, this is my soapbox. The gap between the consumer and the business is increasing. Being able to measure it is critical. We're very happy to share with you the approach that we take and however you want to deliver it is absolutely fine. We have a set of tools that says we can serve businesses, 3.9 million businesses across the UK. We have a training hub that any of you can deploy free of charge on your websites today. One of the legacies of our UKCRF projects is that we have about 200, close to 300 case studies now of businesses who are using social to drive sales. And we can now demonstrate that increases footfall too. We are making that available to every local authority to plug into any local business support programs they have. And please do get in touch with Sarah. Email address is sarahobeytech.com and she will tell you how we can do that. Now, that is not actually the answer to the problem that provides them with access to the training. The biggest challenge is getting them to do it. And that is something we will also share with you if you'd like to know more about it. But you need a massive process to do that because what really matters is that you make that connection with businesses and get them to believe they can. Because as crazy as it sounds, businesses find the leap between not doing it and doing it really big to make. And what we have really focused on last year is that how do you get businesses to step across that void? And we believe not only have we found a way to do that really well, but also we found a way to demonstrate the value to them. So literally, the data I'm sharing with you today around footfall is hot off the press. It went to evaluators on 31st yesterday when all the projects closed. So it's the first time it's been seen anywhere and expect to see much more of it. Because I think the impact of the value of impacting of enabling businesses to be more digital, many people think that just drives e commerce sales, but that's not the case. Yes, it drives e commerce sales, but it has a disproportionate effect on local football. And I think it's really important that message is understood. Slide 32. We're totally committed to this. We provide match funding for every program we deliver. If you want help engaging local businesses, please do get in touch. We've got an extensive CRM program that makes it possible to achieve what previously thought to be impossible. We are really proud of it. We're really excited about it. And even if you just want to pick our brains about how you deliver yourself locally, please, please get in touch. Because my message today is I now can say unequivocally that digital activity attracts footfall. And make sure your town has a voice. Make sure you help your independent businesses have a voice. Because it matters. And we do now need to start talking about Christmas next year. Really? Sorry, but it takes a long time to get these things set up and running. We deploy in seven days. But businesses take a long time to change behavior. And helping them understand how to do this, I think is absolutely fundamental to the future of a high street. Off my soapbox from KFC in Oxford. Sarah, over to you. Either you're on mute or. Or all my sound is broken.

Oh, no, I was. Yes, I was on mute. It's always. There's always one on every. Every webinar.

It's kind of.

I think it's. It's part of the law now. Somebody has to be hopeless. Today was my turn. No, I mean, I can't really follow that, Polly. I. I too are very famous for getting on my soapbox too. But I'm here. I am here to help. I can help you with giving you access to your Data. I've actually got about 25 emails in my inbox already. Please may have my data. Please may I have my data? I will be back to you this afternoon with that data and I'm here to help you understand how our business support works and how we can perhaps work with you to do feasibility studies and so on. So as I say, I'm sarah@maybetech.com those of you that know me know that I'm pretty approachable, I'm kind of good fun and I'm very passionate about what we do and I'd really like to help and to work with you. So I think that's probably me. My soapbox done from Warwickshire next to the kitchen sink, which is blurred out.

Sarah, thank you so much. Thank you all for attending today. I think there's been a question around do we provide the training so businesses 100% can access the training on maybe for free? Yeah. Get in touch with Sarah and we'll show you how to do that. What we do is we help put programs together. That means that we can put people, put businesses through a structured training program and drive engagement. That bit's not free, but you can have the hub for free 100% today, embed it in your websites and we can help you. We can tell you how we put programs together. And if you'd like to take that information and do it yourself, fine. If you'd like us to do it for you, we can do that too. Thank you so much and look forward to talking to you. I hope that's been valuable. We've enjoyed it. I hope you did too. And see you When's the next High Street Task Force webinar, Sarah?

Oh, first Wednesday of March. Don't ask me for the date. I don't know off the top of the my head.

First Wednesday, March.

Hopefully I'll give you plenty of notice and you'll got lots of my lovely reminders and my nice final call one this morning. So I'll make sure you don't miss it. And also I'll follow up with perhaps a link to wider part of the research data, the consumer research data around Christmas and obviously your local data for those that are requesting it and with a recording of said webinar so that you can share with any colleagues or anybody else you think it might be valuable to.

There was a lovely message, actually. I'll just repeat for Bridget Galloway. Thank you. Bridget, I hope you don't mind me shouting you out here. I know what you're saying. It works. We demonstrated the value with the walkabout with our Cabinet members to post on council on Twitter, businesses went up. And he then wanted to do a video. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Bridget. It's. It's like a light bulb when you think, gosh, something so simple can have such a big impact on my place. Delighted to show you more about it. Thank you very much and see you same time, same place in a month's time.