17/04/23 | Case Study, Marketing, Opinion

Amy

Copy, Content

Why celebrate a company anniversary?

A company anniversary or milestone is an opportunity to recognise the longevity and achievements of your company, and the people who work there.

Celebrating a company anniversary enables you to publicly reflect on why your business has stood the test of time, and there are plenty of ways to mark the occasion without sounding braggy or boring people.

Top reasons to celebrate a company anniversary:

• Recognise the longevity of your business
• Celebrate your team, partners and customers
• Acknowledge achievements and hard work
• Show your proven track record to potential customers
• Stand out from less established competitors
• Drive marketing engagement and reach

What’s the average age of a company?

The average age of a company in the UK is 8.6 years (March 2022). This has gradually declined from 10.7 years since the year 2000. Many businesses never make it past the first five years, and the average age of a dissolved company is 4.9 years.

The largest proportion of businesses are aged between 1 – 4 years (36%), with 22% of businesses aged between 5 – 9 years, dropping to less than 4% for businesses aged between 20 – 24 years.

(Stats from gov.uk)

Reaching any company anniversary or milestone from 1 year to 10, 25 or 100 is a massive achievement. By passing these milestones, your business proves it has longstanding value, experience, and a presence within the marketplace.

How to celebrate a company anniversary

Although it’s certainly an achievement, there is a balance to strike when publicly celebrating a company anniversary. News of your company anniversary is not going to break the internet, and other people are likely to be less excited than those within your business.

The goal is to celebrate the milestone without overkilling the message and causing your audience to switch off. Working with B2B SMEs, we see the engagement that comes from celebrating an anniversary and we’ve run many campaigns around this theme.

The most recent was for our client Aquatrust – a family-run water treatment and safety business based in Yorkshire. We have worked with Aquatrust since 2021 and March 2023 marked their 20^th year in business.

Aquatrust has a close-knit team who regularly go on team hikes and do charity work. They commemorated the anniversary privately with a company-wide BBQ and social afternoon. As Aquatrust’s marketing team, we put together a digital comms plan to share the milestone with their wider network.

What digital marketing activity we fulfilled:

• News article for website
• Interviews with the leadership team
• 20 years badge and banner for website
• 20 years badge for design assets
• Announcement in their company e-newsletter
• Social campaign around running for the month of the anniversary
• Animated gif featuring team, history and photos

This campaign ran alongside Aquatrust’s regular digital marketing activity, including their daily social schedule, quarterly emails, and monthly website content updates.

This meant there were plenty of other relevant messages going out to Aquatrust’s audience around the same time, and people weren’t bombarded with messages about the anniversary and nothing else.

Sharing the people behind the business

Something we regularly remind our B2B SME clients is people buy from people, and prospects want to see the friendly trusted faces behind an established business or brand.

We put together a blog article for the anniversary campaign highlighting the team behind Aquatrust. With a great culture, the business has excellent employee retention, with many of the team having worked there from its origins.

Sharing the highlights from the past 20 years from the perspective of the team made a great story and gave a voice to the people that make Aquatrust the successful business it is. We included images gathered from the team and quotes from the leadership team.

Here’s the company anniversary blog post example:

CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF AQUATRUST

How to celebrate a company anniversary on social media

We manage the LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook presence for Aquatrust. These are established pages with monthly schedules featuring a mix of planned messages and in-the-moment updates, giving us a great platform to promote the anniversary from.

Company anniversary post ideas:

Here’s how we shared the news on LinkedIn:

This post works as the ‘on this day’ intro grabs initial attention. We included a quote from the Sales Director and linked the blog article for the full story. We tagged the leadership team to encourage interaction and increase the potential audience reach.

Here’s the same post for Twitter:

In 2003 Johnny Cash passed away, David Blaine spent 44 days in a glass box above the Thames, Cristiano Ronaldo made his Manchester United debut – and @Aquatrust was born! ????????

Celebrating 20 years of Aquatrust! ???????? #ukmfghttps://t.co/PdqIluwIyK

— Aquatrust (@Aquatrust) March 2, 2023

We kept this shorter to suit the platform, still using the ‘on this day’ content. This is the pinned post so anyone visiting the Aquatrust page will see it first.

On Facebook, we used this gif:

Facebook is the most personal platform and the gif gave a nice behind the scenes snapshot of the people at Aquatrust, including some of their teambuilding activities.

Results

We saw a spike in activity for the anniversary month, including:

• 26.6% more visits to the website compared to the previous year
• 209% increase in page impressions on Facebook compared to the previous month
• 58% post engagement rate on LinkedIn

To put this into context, a good engagement rate for Linkedin is usually about 2%, climbing to 5 or 6%, depending on the type of post.

As you can see from the results, company anniversary content has a place in the digital marketing mix, and can boost engagement and awareness of your business.

The key is making sure that company-focused content is balanced with the rest of your messaging, and doesn’t override the useful information customers and prospects need to do business with you.

We hope this has given you some ideas for celebrating a company anniversary and shown the value that people and culture based activity has within your business’s digital marketing strategy.

If you need help boosting your brand’s website or social media content, we can help. Drop us a note at hello@yourengineroom.com.

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