The Innovation Revolution
In late 2016, Innovation Saskatchewan (an arms-length government agency) made supporting the technology community in Saskatchewan one of their priority areas. A new transformation strategy was needed to boost Saskatchewan’s image as a rising star in Canada’s tech scene.
Through consultation with the industry, the leadership team concluded that the community needed a digital platform to inform the public about the innovative companies growing in the province.
At KatrinaGerman.com, we are passionate about projects that help to grow Saskatchewan’s economy. It was an honour to create the strategic communications plan and work with the Innovation Saskatchewan staff to implement and measure its success.
It was no small feat to move from an organization with a generic website and no social media to a digital leader in the province. The team developed a plan to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Slack and email marketing to start the “The Innovation Revolution” campaign. The plan included strategies to engage the organization, staff, partners, tech companies and the media.
Saskatchewan has a strong ecosystem to support tech entrepreneurs. The community worked together to use the #sktech hashtag and share success stories from the revamped Innovation Saskatchewan website. Through many initiatives and with the help of dedicated entrepreneurs, Saskatoon is now the second-fastest growing tech sector in Canada. The “Innovation Revolution” campaign is providing the content to loudly share this success.
Some of the highlights of the campaign (so far):
The redesign of the website dropped bounce rates from 68% to 7%
The Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin profiles moved from no activity to a reach of around 600,000 people
The #SKTech hashtag has over 7.4 million impressions
Our email strategy has open and click-through rates that are double those of other government correspondence in North America
As a bonus, it was recently announced that the “Innovation Revolution” campaign was nominated for a national “Digital Transformation Award” presented by IT World Canada.
The coolest part of this entire campaign is the way that our partners and the tech companies have all worked together to highlight our successes.
Viva la Innovation Revolution!