Regional Business Partners Funding Digital Capability Overview – September 2021

What a year it’s been and now there’s more funding available to help your business in New Zealand due to the impact of the previous 12 months and closed borders. This funding may be available to you if you run a tourism related business, or your business has been impacted by the lack of tourists and you are located in the hardest hit regions – Kaikoura and MacKenzie, Southland, Queenstown Lakes District and Westland).

Traditionally, GST registered New Zealand based small businesses may qualify for vouchers to help pay for services such as training workshops, courses and coaching that build the management capabilities of their owners and key managers, however the funding available through these schemes have change significantly this time round and now covers :

• $10m Business Advisory Support (growing management capability via advice and support)
• $10m in grants to help with implementing business advice
• There’s also a bigger tourism kickstart fund which will have details announced later

For both the first funds a business may receive up to $5000 for each fund

There’s a number of different ways we can help you whether we’ve worked with you in the past or not. The video below outlines a few options, as does the rest of this article. Note this video is focused on digital capability – the funding is available for many other areas such as finance and planning.

The aim of these services are to help you gain clarity in your business and utilise digital marketing as best as you can.

All funding decisions are made by your Growth Advisor, not by the service provider.

Note : There are many many providers in the system and not all are created equally. Do your research wisely. Have a look at our Fully Charged Media Google Reviews, many of which are as a result of us working with businesses through this program.

During this time we’ve helped a number of businesses across a range of digital marketing related areas such as :

• In depth digital marketing reviews and audits covering everything from Google My Business right through to website performance, analytics and tracking and paid media analysis.
• Working through a customer journey and mapping that to identify areas of improvement and growth
• Upskilling on email marketing solutions
• Google Analytics workshops to help upskill teams to work out what’s working, what’s not, and grow knowledge of marketing data
• Youtube marketing workshops
• Helping businesses identify how to change or remarket their existing offerings
• …and a lot more.

Some of the results from follow up work from our reviews have done the following :

• Take a restaurant from Page 4 in Google to organic #1
• Take a travel agent from page 10 to page 1
• Get people booked on repatriation flights with a unique ad campaign to back up publicity
• Google Ad campaigns with up to 38x return on ad spend
• …and as importantly, just gaining clarity on how to improve what you already have and options for the future.

Our reviews are often eye openers when they highlight the areas of improvement and how much you may be leaving on the table.

RBP & Tourism Funding Application Process

So how do you apply if you are not in the system already? The process to apply can be summarised as :

• Read about the funding and requirements from MBIE
• Complete the application form on https://www.regionalbusinesspartners.co.nz and contact your local Growth Advisor.
• You can say you would like to work with us but you cannot apply for work in progress already.
• If you are likely to get funding your Growth Advisor may ask us to send you through a high level proposal of work we can help with.
• If you are successful for the advice funding, we will create an “Event” and supply you with a reference to book against.

If you are in Otago you can read the local Regional Business Partners information on the Otago Chamber website

If you are allocated an allowance for COVID related help, please have a think about what goals or changes you are looking to make as that will help us identify how to utilise the funding as best as we can. Let’s face it we’ll all have to pay for this for years to come, so let’s now squander it on bad advice and poor implementations.

If you have any other queries, get in touch with me at darren(at)fullychargedmedia.com or if you would like to have a quick chat with us you can call me personally on 0217 43107 but be aware we are not the decision makers when it comes to funding, but we know the team well.

You can also book a quick 15 minutes call with Darren via the online booking process if you want to go through potential options in more detail.

About Fully Charged Media

At Fully Charged Media we live and breath digital and our mission to decrease the digital marketing knowledge gap so the world can get better digital marketing projects delivered. We haven’t just tacked on digital marketing as a revenue stream to our development, design or video business. We have been mentored by world leading Google Ads and Facebook ad trainers and in relevant mastermind groups for both that and analytics. We are certified partners of Digital Marketers, the world’s largest digital marketing and research organisation. We’re Google and Shopify Partners, and also partners of Active Campaign and Klaviyo email marketing solutions. I’ve also spoken at events in the tourism industry, as well as digital marketing conferences for both businesses and developers around New Zealand and in Australia.