“Pay & Display” Local Business Tax Campaign

About the Program

Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

In 2016, the Miami-Dade County Finance Department (Finance) reached out to the Miami-Dade County Communications Department (COM) to conduct an awareness and compliance campaign. Finance needed to communicate with and register businesses that were unaware of the Local Business Tax requirement, or chose not to pay the Local Business Tax. The goal of the campaign was to boost compliance with the requirement while increasing tax revenues from unregistered and delinquent businesses. This marked the first time that the Finance Department had conducted a paid advertising campaign to communicate with businesses since 2007. Since Finance had a limited budget of $10,000, plus an additional $5,000 from COM, a small digital advertising campaign was launched. The campaign’s message to businesses was simple and direct: Pay & Display—Pay your local business taxes, and display your local business tax receipt prominently at your place of business. The paid portion of the campaign utilized a combination of online display ads, mobile display ads, search engine marketing, social media advertising and native advertising. Non-paid channels included messages on the County’s web portal. The Pay & Display campaign ran August–September 2016 to coincide with the Local Business Tax deadline of September 30th. As a result of these promotions, page views to Finance’s website increased 59% during September year over year. Moreover, the percentage of September’s online payments increased to 36.5% of all payments compared to the previous year’s 31.8%. The dollar amount of payments increased by $247,071—a 1.6% increase over the previous year.