Social Media & PR Case Study - Natures Corner
Background
Natures Corner is Newbury's only independent health food store. We specialise in organic health food, natural remedies and therapies, body care, homeopathy, aromatherapy and environmentally-friendly household products, as well as stocking many unusual gifts. There is also a sister e-commerce website.
The store, which is in Bartholomew Street, Newbury is managed by myself, Liz Chandler and my sister Caroline Withers. Our goal has always been to create a store where the health-conscious can easily find natural remedies, together with advice and information.
We have always enjoyed good PR in the Newbury and enjoy a loyal following among our customers. However we also regularly have visitors to the store who might be local but are only just discovering us. We wanted to celebrate our 10th anniversary and asked Morgan PR to explore how this could increase footfall into the store.
We had already built a significant presence on Twitter after attending one of Morgan PR’s Twitter Workshops and have enjoyed ongoing support and guidance on how to use this platform so we were keen to know how social media could help us further and what role traditional methods should serve.
We met with Nigel Morgan from Morgan PR and he was thorough in exploring what we wanted to achieve and the resources available.
Solution
Morgan PR produced a reassuringly holistic solution. It was a combined approach that used some traditional advertising, public relations and social media. They were creative and came up with innovative ideas and explained how we could best use our planned ideas.
- £10,000 Prize Giveaway – with daily prize draws that built our customer database.
- An email campaign to our existing customers about the events.
- A campaign on Twitter that promoted prizes and events during the anniversary week.
- A product discount voucher distributed through Twitter
- Advertising in the week before in the Newbury Weekly News
- A press release before and during the anniversary week
- Supporting blogs on the Morgan PR website.
Outcome
Our 10th anniversary week was amazing! It was incredibly busy every day and we saw many of our regular customers and crucially plenty of new faces too. Significantly many of those new customers have continued to shop with us on a regular basis and we saw an overall increase in average spend. This was a terrific result, not least considering the prevailing economic situation and the impact on retail.
Specifically we saw the following percentage increases in footfall, our original aim, as follows:
| The week before the 10th Anniversary |
10%
|
| The week of the 10th Anniversary |
19%
|
| One week after |
17%
|
| Two weeks after |
14%
|
| Three weeks after |
13%
|
Admittedly there was a certain leap of faith with the use of social media but it paid off, as did the whole campaign and we are continuing to benefit from this campaign and we offer our heartfelt recommendations for using Morgan PR to promote your business.
Liz Chandler
Natures Corner
View from Morgan PR
Nigel Morgan of Morgan PR adds: This was a successful campaign that illustrates the power of what we call Organic PR; we simply leveraged the good work that Natures Corner was doing through the most appropriate channels. Our job was made much easier courtesy of the strong brand presence that Natures Corner enjoyed after 10 years serving the people of Newbury and West Berkshire.