The Brief
Trafford Palazzo is the sister retail, dining & entertainment centre to Manchester’s Trafford Centre. Following a multi-million pound refurbishment and rebranding, the centre was looking forward to welcoming a host of new tenants and pop-up events, including King Pins bowling, Nerf Action Experience, Archies, EL&N and the TP Glow pop-up fashion event with iconic brands like Oh Polly and Nadine Merabi.
With such a packed calendar of openings and events, Trafford Palazzo challenged Carousel to review the brand’s current social media and influencer marketing strategy and offer strategic consultancy services to enable the brand to stand out from its more established neighbour, The Trafford Centre. Our mission was to offer actionable advice to allow Trafford Palazzo’s team to grow its social media audience, maximise reach and visibility, drive active fan engagement and ultimately ensure this converts to strong footfall. We were also enlisted to create bespoke video content for the brand’s TikTok channel in order to capitalise on this strong growth opportunity.
Our Response
With all consultancy clients, our first stop is to conduct a thorough audit of the brand’s current activity, audience insights and competitor benchmarking to gain an in-depth understanding of the landscape in order to inform the creation of a tailored strategy playbook.
We compiled an extensive report using our social media reporting tools to analyse factors such as what drives fan/follower growth, engagement, fan sharing and reach across each of Trafford Palazzo’s existing social media channels, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter. We looked at trends around the brand’s most and least successful content, alongside the tactics that do and don’t work for competitors, to gain actionable learnings to shape the strategy.
We used this to craft a bespoke strategy pack for Trafford Palazzo, outlining a framework to push customers through the marketing funnel from initial awareness, to consideration, footfall and repeat custom, with social media tactics to guide them at every step of the journey. This included outlining channel recommendations for each audience sub-group, suggested content pillars, look and feel guidance, tone of voice, format support, hashtag advice, best practice technical tips, and legal guidance around copyright for influencer assets and trending sounds.
The recommendations were underpinned by full guidance on the brand’s paid social approach, offering expertise on how social media advertising could best be used to grow brand awareness, drive consideration and generate footfall.
We also provided extensive inspiration on campaign themes and ideas Trafford Palazzo could weave into their content for upcoming launches, and a video production approach to meet the growing video demands of formats like TikTok and Instagram reels. Likewise, we shared best-practice guidance on leveraging fans, influencers and partner brands to maximise awareness and channel growth, and showed Trafford Palazzo how the social media strategy could best integrate with other communication channels in order to maximise impact, including website, email and in-centre displays.
With this strategic framework in place, we begun working closely with Trafford Palazzo’s in-house marketing team to implement the findings into the brand’s day to day social media and influencer strategy. This includes providing regular updates on emerging trends and new features that the brand could take advantage of in its content calendar, coordinating influencer visits to promote key launches and events, and monthly video production shoots on-location at Trafford Palazzo’s tenant spaces to capture fresh footage which is weaved into TikTok-ready formats to capture the audience’s attention.
The Results
To date, implementing the strategic recommendations outlined in the playbook has resulted in the brand attracting 1.2k new fans & followers across its channels in the space of two months, as well as generating a social media reach of over 250k for the brand channels.
