Influencer Marketing Campaign
St Johns Shopping Centre, opened in 1969, is the largest indoor shopping centre in Liverpool and is home to over 100 stores and unique fashion retailers.
As Covid-19 restrictions began to ease in 2021, St Johns were looking to reengage with their grassroots shoppers who had been absent from the centre during the pandemic.
To get the local community back out and shopping once again in the centre, we worked with St Johns to create an integrated campaign built around influencer engagement.
The goals for this campaign were to:
- Increase footfall in the centre
- Gain (and retain) followers on Instagram to better reach customers
With St Johns’ target audience in mind, we developed an influencer-centred campaign which included:
- Press coverage to reassure and entice audiences
- Out-of-home advertising on key commuter routes to reaffirm our offering
- Influencer engagement to inspire and provoke action from audiences
The strategy we used focused on segmenting the grassroots audience, identifying influencers who were most likely to relate with this group of people, and allowing social content created by real people to form the basis of the campaign. This was designed to encourage people to return to the centre, prompted by reassuring messages – largely driven by social media and influencer activity, reaching the targets we had set.
For the campaign, we worked with influencers of different ages, backgrounds and social followings. So, as well as appealing to a diverse audience base, they were able to create content that highlighted the true breadth of the centre’s offering, from food and drink to beauty, fashion and homeware.
Trust was placed in these influencers, meaning heightened brand trust for the campaign, which helped to increase the impact of the out-of-home activity in high-footfall locations around the city, all aligning with consistent messaging which was incorporated into creative PR content.
The out-of-home components for this campaign included an external wall vinyl positioned in a high-footfall city centre location and train station advertising.
Clio Young, campaigns manager at Kenyons, said: “Using local micro-influencers was a key component for expanding our reach in an authentic and meaningful way. We found that integrating influencer marketing into our traditional marketing mix was very beneficial and resulted in a campaign with considerable online – and offline – impact.”
The campaign has been well received by the client and shoppers within Liverpool. We were able to reach a wide variety of audiences, communicating key messages to them via the most effective channels. The influencer content produced throughout the campaign achieved a total combined reach of over 1 million. Alongside this, St Johns’ Instagram page successfully grew its following and has since retained this.
The campaign showed innovation by:
- Engaging authentic influencers which our audience could relate to and place trust in
- Creating compelling, memorable visuals which captured audience attention
- Using local slang to evoke audience pride in their home city
- Working with a small budget to achieve big results
