The brand launch campaign at Harbour Studios applied a number of digital marketing tactics to support brand awareness, social media engagement, and the launch of the premises. Through research, testing, incentives and promotions, we created an exciting, successful local Torbay brand.
How do digital marketing tactics work?
Digital marketing tactics are actions developed from the overarching digital marketing strategy for the business. Each strand of the strategy will have a set of tactical actions that must be completed to achieve the strategy.
Some examples of marketing tactics are:
Offers to improve lead generation
Growing the audience through insights
Strategic hashtag campaigns on social media platforms like Instagram.
We already had an engaging visual identity for the Harbour Studios website and social media platforms. The marketing tactics harness the visual identity and assets and put them to work to attract raise awareness of your brand, generate leads, and communicate your brand messages. Here's a sample of the digital marketing tactics we used to successfully launch the Harbour Studios brand.
Improve lead generation with offers
The second phase, which began with the initial brand awareness campaign, was the lead generation and engagement stage. We increased lead generation by including a free one-day trial as part of a larger marketing plan. Coming out of lockdown, some people were working from home for over a year and had never tried hot desking, so the one-day trial allowed people who were unsure to try a free taster day.
We promoted the offer in the Instagram bio, and in every post across social media and the website. The discount was applied effortlessly using Jotform. It's important to offer a free trial for new products because it's a low-cost way to generate leads. Organically, your audience will be curious about what you have to offer or they'll want to try it out for themselves if possible.
Growing the audience through insights
All our digital marketing strategies are fully researched bespoke for your business. Results are analysed continually to maximise your reach and give your investment lasting impact. We analysed the time of day and day of week for posts to understand how to optimise the social media output for our audience.
We also analysed content to understand which worked best --because we were working with such wide range of images. Some content contained images of the studio, some content featured faces and people, some content was outdoors, including people on beaches, and sunsets.
We feature natural photos of Dartmoor and all along the Southwest coast path in Devon. Based on our research, we understand which content to optimise without over saturating the social media feeds. In digital marketing, it's important to keep all social media feeds dynamic and fresh, but it's critical to understand and have marketing intelligence available to leverage, boost, and make the most of your investment.
Strategic campaign hashtags
We created a bespoke range of clustered social media hashtags for each stage in the digital marketing campaign. Throughout the brand awareness stage, the engagement stage, and the launch stage we used a distinct and separate set of hashtags.
Some social media hashtag clusters reflected the outdoor sporting lifestyle, some reflected the shared workspace and being with colleagues. Some clusters were about supporting the wider business community. Social media hashtags are always under review using analytics to stay up to date, relevant and brand enhancing. It's important to have dynamic hashtag clusters for your audience, and the right hashtags for your business and location.
Split test promotions add value
A good digital marketing campaign should constantly be split testing new offers to improve the results from existing ones. For Harbour Studios, we were constantly looking for ways to maximise engagement rates of previous campaigns by testing different content types at different times.
We operate under the principle that every sponsored social media promotion has a purpose. We tested promotions during the week, at the weekends, and with different audiences. We tested different amounts of investment, different images, different discounts, and different captions to understand what is working best.
Results of the analytics
What we found was that images of faces attracted 50% more engagement, and midweek posts worked best for the brand. As our following grew, we found that our promotion returns on investment grew and we were seeing an increase of 200% in website clicks and enquiries by the time we finished the official launch campaign.
The social media paid promotional campaign has been a big part of the success of the Harbour Studios brand launch, leading to achievement of 91% of the income target for August 2021.
How to signal change in a digital world
As staycations are drawing to an end, we've started to promote our meeting rooms more. We understand that people coming off of holiday are now essentially living with Covid and ready to meet up and get to work. Harbour Studios is supporting the Torbay business community by offering 50% discount on meeting rooms. The evolving Instagram grid signals that we're evolving and changing.
The best is yet to come
The Harbour Studios launch is a great success, but that doesn't mean the end of growth. The digital marketing strategy allows for continually evolving tactics and finding new ways to support the Torbay business community. We are growing through new uses for the space including collaborative and seasonal space, and those announcements are forthcoming.
Is your digital marketing smart enough?
Ask your digital agency how their tactics, actions, and promotions support your marketing strategy. Our relentless research and attention to detail makes your content work harder and last longer. This more efficient way of marketing your business will lead to more enquiries and better business results. Get in touch to learn how Treat can help you.