Make is responsible for the marketing activity for Covent Garden-based shopping, dining, and wellness destination, The Yards, who are managed by CBRE + Knight Frank. Our services for the hospitality brand span social, content, and advertising, as well as driving influencer partnerships.
In the run-up to Christmas, the brand needed a festive campaign to drive footfall to their mix of retailers, restaurants, and bars. Their brief also included pushing their festive ‘digital drop’ promotion, which saw visitors scanning a QR code to unlock a map highlighting offers, prizes, and experiences each day in the run-up to Christmas.
With multiple shopping destinations in central London competing for our audience's attention, we needed a unique and creative approach to ensure the greatest return on investment for our client.
To create a buzz around The Yards during the Christmas period, the Make team created a Christmas-focused messaging strategy that was bold, distinctive and all about living life to the full. This reflected the overall brand and fed into all our Christmas content and creatives, including a focus on The Yards digital drop campaign, which we named the 12 Drops of Christmas.
We rolled out the campaign across multiple mediums, including designing a series of out-of-home vinyls to be installed across The Yards, promoting the 12 Drops of Christmas.
Simultaneously we arranged for influencers to visit the site and film their time doing everything from dining at venues like Hawksmoor and the Conduit, having their hair done at Patrizia Manias and visiting a Festive Pop up for The Yard’s Christmas Light switch on event.
Lastly, we ran Paid Media campaigns across Meta, Pinterest, TikTok and Google Search Ads, and organic postings across Instagram and TikTok, boosting the most well-performing organic posts to further drive engagement. We discovered that boosting UGC content delivered higher engagement at lower cost efficiencies. As opposed to heavily designed ads, people gravitated towards lifestyle content that aligns with their personal interests, daily life, and activities. This was a vital finding and we were able to adapt the content strategy based on this going forward.
Our Christmas campaign was a massive success, seeing a 69% increase in social media engagement, an 74% increase in new followers and 119,404 total paid conversions. Two TikTok posts in particular received over 230,000 views each on TikTok alone and the campaign received over half a million views in general.
This led to significant real-world results, with The Yards seeing an increased footfall across the entire month of December of 14.43%.
