FAIRMONT — Fairmont Area Life previously started a geofencing campaign to recruit people to move to Fairmont and retain those people. This campaign efforts consist of talking about the work force, engaging young professionals, keeping them here once they arrive and talk about and brag about Fairmont’s community and what it has to offer.

Fairmont Area Life is a partnership between Visit Fairmont, Fairmont Economic Development Authority (FEDA) and the Fairmont Chamber of Commerce. The geofencing campaign started when the partnership sat at a table trying to figure out how to get more people to understand that Fairmont is on the map and what Fairmont has to offer. Ideas were thrown around on whether to do a billboard or advertise in some magazines.

“Having to try to answer the question of how can we reach a whole bunch of people in the area we wanted to reach and how do we track it and know it’s working,” City of Lakes Media Station Manager Keith Hoye said. “We talked a lot about billboards and how many people drive by billboards and that’s where we landed on the geofence and in seven counties basically placing digital billboards to the people that we choose in those counties and the demographics that we want to.”

The geofencing campaign is run through Linder Digital when it comes to analytics, the partnership meets every two weeks to have a meeting and have created a social media campaign via Facebook and tracking on the Fairmont Area Life website. As of right now the geofencing campaign consists of 605,000 impressions, 469 clicks and 5,500 engagements.

Their banners will only be served on the top 2,000 websites ranked by comp score. For example ESPN, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News will have these banners and can only be seen by the target group.

“Out of all those numbers probably the most exciting is 5,500 people have viewed and engaged with our banner, pictures of the community, word clouds with all of the reasons that we are passionate to be a part of it,” Hoye said. “We’re still talking on a grander scale of 5,500 plus people have looked at the top-10 reasons to come to Fairmont.”

Economic Development Coordinator Linsey Preuss stated that the first target demographic was women with children that made $50,000 or more and were ages 30 to 60. The reasoning behind it was the partnership thought that women generally make those decisions and ended up opening it up to men and women that had a form of post-secondary education and changing the income level.

The geofencing campaign started with just getting one family to move to Fairmont. That goal was met with the geofencing campaign that brought two families to Fairmont. Preuss stated that the families love the area.

“They’ve been really excited to find the small community feel,” Preuss said, “People are so friendly when they pass them on the street they say ‘hi’ instead of ignoring you and pretending you do not exist.”

Executive Director of Visit Fairmont Stephanie Busiahn headed up the landing page of Fairmont Area Life’s website. Busiahn and Visit Fairmont got involved to play off some of the marketing that they’re already doing to visitors and bring that knowledge and background to Fairmont Area Life and have that be utilized to gear toward the relocation effort.

“From Visit Fairmont’s perspective, usually we’re looking at visitors coming to our community, visiting and going back home,” Busiahn said. “Part of the draw for us in terms of getting involved with Fairmont Area Life was that if it’s something that is good for our visitors it’s good for our community and vice-versa good for our residents.”

Fairmont Area Life created the Top 10 reasons to pack your bags and move to Fairmont. Those reasons include things such as to visit a different park everyday of the month without leaving city limits, four different educational options for your child all within minutes of your home and being Within a couple hours of four regional hubs.

“One of our top-10 is we’re a telecommuter community,” Preuss said. “We have the bandwidth to have fiber (optics) and if you can work from anywhere, rethink that and you’re in the metro and want to relocate then why not Fairmont.”

This is not a one-and-done effort. This partnership is on their geofencing campaign, but that there could be more campaigns and efforts.

The overall message Fairmont Area Life wanted to send was that there are efforts being done to bring new people to this community and that the entities in the partnership that sit around the table see the opportunity in Fairmont.

“Everybody who sits around here loves this community and thinks that there are enough really great reasons to live here,” President of Fairmont Area Chamber of Commerce Ned Koppen said. “We’re willing to make the effort and reach out to anybody who’s thinking about relocating and why not here.”