This is the second year in which American Express joins forces with Bank Hapoalim to increase public awareness about small businesses, which constitute 98% of businesses in Israel. Our office was glad to take part and promote the efforts in the digital realm.

We understood that in order to reach the public’s heart we needed divide our efforts into two parts. In the first, we encouraged business owners to participate and to offer unique benefits; and in the second, we urged the public to support the small businesses and make and purchases from them.

As part of the campaign we developed a platform that allows business owners to participate in the promotion, and helps customers to find these businesses and receive details about ongoing sales. The clientele was exposed to banners and announcements that we created on social networks and Google by means of SEO and PPC, and by advertising on additional sites within the relevant industries.

We developed a convenient and clear registration process, adapted to mobile devices, in order to allow registration in the field by American Express representatives. As part of the registration process the business owners were offered to add the business’s logo and geographical location, thereby increasing exposure to the nearby clientele.

We developed a mechanism that could automatically send text messages to business owners when they joined Small Business Day. The text message contained the username and password that were uniquely issued during registration. This enabled the business owner to login at any time and update their details.

For the second part of the campaign, we invited the public to support and buy from the small businesses, and gave exposure to the benefits of the business according the users’ locations. On the website, the user’s location is automatically identified by the WiFi network, while the cellular version uses GPS.

Using the advanced search methods that we developed for the platform, users are able to find businesses according to various industries or keywords, with the businesses displayed on a map that interfaces Google Maps. The favorites mechanism we developed allows visitors to save and add businesses to a personal list, and to plan for which businesses to visit on the actual event day.

The entire campaign that we managed in the digital realm produced especially impressive results compared to previous years: the campaign announcements and banners received 14,012,757 views across the net (including social impressions), and more than 15,000 small businesses joined. There were 38,614 different visitors who logged in to search for businesses using the platform on the actual day of the event, where 19,891 users found small businesses using mobile devices.  There were 12,756 internet users involved who started discussions concerning this subject on social networks during Small Business Day.

Even now, after the Small Business Day campaign has ended, the Business Day site still appears on the first page of Google search results for the relevant keywords, thanks to successful SEO work during the campaign.