WESTLOCK – The Village of Clyde is promoting itself as a great place to live, work and play, with help from a new video that was published to the village’s website Jan. 11.
The new promotional video was filmed and produced by communications consultant Paul Smith of Smith Media Solutions in Morinville and features original music and interviews with locals, including mayor Charis Aguirre and Eleanor Hall School principal Nadine Marchand, as it highlights the village, its people, and local businesses.
In a presentation to village councillors at the Jan. 9 regular meeting, Smith noted the intended audience was “not so much Clyde residents and businesses” but those outside its boundaries.
The four-minute-long video was filmed in Clyde in November and December and has been dubbed the ‘winter version’ with a ‘summer version’ expected to be filmed in late spring or early summer. Smith said the promotional video, available by visiting www.villageofclyde.ca, helps lay the “groundwork and the foundation for communications (in the village) moving forward.”
Included are interviews with residents, community volunteers, and the business community who “talk about why Clyde is where you want to invest in, where you want to live or where you want your kids to go to school,” said CAO Jaye Parrent. “It’s an interest piece about Clyde and what the village has to offer.”
Smith noted how the village’s website can be used as an economic development tool, which can include utilizing Google ads and Facebook ads aimed at Edmonton residents whose postal codes were shown to visit the website most frequently. In doing so, it helps redirect outside visitors to different parts of the website showcasing the village.
“When we did the research on what the video needs to be about, I took a look at website analytics and Facebook analytics … using those kinds of tools, last year (the village) had 3,242 unique visitors on your website,” said Smith, noting where those website visitors were from. “It’s about 270 for the average in the month and on the year more than 2,300 came from Edmonton.”
Aguirre said they are “super excited” with the video and said “Paul Smith and his business did an excellent job bringing it together and showing all the things that Clyde has to offer. We would love to have new residents or even some new businesses coming into the area.”
