Whilst in lockdown, we’ve noticed the number of people taking time to reminisce about the ‘good times’ has definitely increased across social media. Of course, we couldn’t help but take a little trip down memory lane ourselves…
Today, we’re reflecting on all the fun we’ve had so far working with The Brewery Shopping Centre, Romford.
When we were awarded the marketing contract in October 2018, we couldn’t wait to get stuck in, after all, who doesn’t love creating social media posts, thinking up events and making sure a website is in order? No? Oh, maybe that’s just us then…
…And a lot has happened in a year and a half of working with this awesome centre and management team. Get ready…
EVENTS
We love it when a client gives us the scope to be creative, and The Brewery get gold stars for this. We always like to make sure customers are happy and that we build memories, and we’re pleased to say, we think we’ve done just that, from family fun to community initiatives. Here’s just two!
Hug a Hedgehog (Family fun)
We created a Hug A Hedgehog event taking inspiration from one of the murals from the Brewery’s Art Trail project. This kicked off the half term holidays activities and the strategy was to continue supporting and driving awareness of the Walk On The Wild Side project. Hug A Hedgehog was designed to be an engaging, fun and a free event for families.
The results: An increased footfall of 2.2% and happy customers…
‘Aw it’s nice they do things like this for free. It’s always fun to stop by.’ PARENT.
The Brewery Sleepout
With a high proportion of homelessness in the area, Centre Manager Tom Stobbart wanted to use the community and retailer influence of the shopping centre to make a change. Working with Kim Merry, founder of Homeless charity Hope4Havering, the concept of a retailer and management sleepout in the centre’s carpark was coined.
The results: Social reach soared to 12,317 and fundraising targets doubled to over £10k. Press in local papers and on radio also raised awareness of this very important topic, while retailers felt they were part of something important, thus boosting morale.
SOCIAL TALKS
Wow, who knew that social strategies could do such great things? Well, in this case we like to think it has, because we’re so pleased to announce that we have grown the Brewery’s social media reach from an average of 9k reach to 46k a month. That’s an increase of over 500%! How? Well, in a nutshell… We began with a hook of competitions (more of that below) and then, once we’d reeled everyone in, we got to work on a social strategy. We’re not afraid to admit, we created content around a trial and error approach – some posts worked better than others, but that’s what gave us the insight to work out what came next.
The result: A comprehensive strategy including community posts, real-life posts and a sprinkling of fun memes with celebrity ideas to boot.
COMPETITIONS
We love talking to people on the ground and that includes retailers. And it’s a good thing too, because our engagement with these guys means we secured 15 competitions over a 12 month period.
The results: A total of 2,609 entries and 19 very happy winners. On average we receive over 100 entries per a competition, and our most successful prize to date has been 2 tickets to Vue Cinema… #justsaying.
WEB WISE
Websites eh, they do a lot of work to bring in footfall and we know how important they are. That’s why over the year and a half that we have worked with the Brewery, we’ve ensured information such as opening and closing times, new stores and events are always updated.
The results: Website traffic is up 25% y-o-y in Q4, New Users up 23% y-o-y in Q4 and the bounce rate is also consistent y-o-y. The latter means that users are finding the information they need efficiently, which means we get a gold star ?.
GROWING EMAIL
Yup, like a website, this is also a medium that’s key to driving that footfall and we’ve worked hard to grow the database through competitions, regular newsletters and raising the Brewery activities via the website.
The results: Grown email database from 4,735 to 7,977. That’s a massive 40.7% database increase!
So that’s it in a bigger than average nutshell. Want your centre to be as great as this? Give us a call now!
