Earlier this year, an Essex shopping centre came to us, as they had BIG plans for their Instagram, and challenged us to work up a strategy which would:
- Evolve the look & feel of the grid, creating premium & professional content that would resonate with their audience
- Increase reach and engagement by:
- Engaging with their community not only on their own page, but within the wider local Instagram community
- Posting insta stories which highlight our retailers’ offerings, in a fun & engaging way.
- Grow their follower base, focusing on an audience within the local community
These challenges were RIGHT up our street and so we, of course got ‘to it’ straight away…
Our Approach
Challenge 1: Evolving grid content…
Whilst previous content had been informative, when it all sat alongside each other, together on the grid, it lacked an aesthetic ‘flow’ which prevented it from looking premium. With our new approach we ensured we incorporated bright and bold imagery with colours and tones linking across each piece of content. Additionally, we added branding to each post to help raise the centre’s profile and give it a professional ‘sign off.’
It was vital that we created content that not only looked great, but resonated with the client’s audience and was, of course, relevant to their offering.
Having run our client’s facebook and twitter social platforms for a while, we had insight into the content themes and topics which resonated with their audience. We used this insight to help us plan each post, ensuring each piece of content also related back to shopping centre and its retailers.
A key take-out, for Instagram, is that it’s vital to think ‘consumer’ first and ‘business’ second. Why? If you think about it, consumers scroll through their feed at speed and you have less than a second to grab their attention. If your content is too business-centric, it’s likely to pass the consumer by. If, however, you use imagery and content themes that appeal the consumer’s needs, wants or passion-points, you’re more likely to grab their attention. You can then add your comms message into the copy once they’re engaged. Simple when you know how, hey?
Challenge 2: Increasing reach & engagement…
One of the main client objectives was increasing reach and awareness of the shopping centre within the local community. This objective was tied closely with engagement, as in order to truly reach the locals, it was important to be engaging with them….after all, Instagram is a social platform!
Our main strategy to achieve this was to raise the shopping centre’s profile by following local businesses and people and doing daily outreach, where we would look for conversations where it seemed natural for the shopping centre to comment on outsideof their own grid.
We followed local hashtags and dedicated time each day to joining in the local conversation so that we would reach and engage with as many people as we could, particularly those not yet following us.
It wasn’t long before we noticed a huge increase in conversation and other local pages tagging the shopping centre….scroll on to see the incredible results!
We also started posting daily insta stories for our client in order to further reach the community and ensure the shopping centre was always top of mind, appearing at the top of users’ homepage on Instagram.
We created a series of branded and eye-catching templates which encouraged the client’s audience to interact with them….
Ultimately, the new story content formats:
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- Drove engagement with the local community – giving their audience fun, added value to interact with
- Enable the centre to support their retailers in a more engaging way
- Allow the centre to show how the strive to be a part of the wider local community
Challenge 3: Growing a local follower base…
Our final challenge was to grow a local follower base for the client. Our strategy for this was really based on the success of the content we were producing and our success at engaging and reaching the local community. Why? Our logic is, if you are authentically engaging with your audience and creating relevant content that resonates, the follower numbers will look after themselves….and they certainly did in this case….scroll down for the results.
The bit you’ve all been waiting for: the results…
Well, it’s fair to say, the new Instagram strategy was a success.
We ran the new strategy for 3 months before looking at the results compared to the previous 3 months and this is what was achieved:
Pretty chuffed, doesn’t come close.
There are few things we love more than driving results that deliver for our clients. If you’d like to discuss how we can do the same for you, get in touch to arrange a friendly chat with our Social Media team!
