Family events at Guildhall Shopping & Dining | Veloc...

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Guildhall Shopping & Dining, England Family events capture data and drive immediate sales

The Background & Challenge

The Guildhall, Exeter which opened in 1976 as a mixed outdoor and indoor scheme underwent a revamp in recent years, creating a modern food quarter complemented by a central outdoor space with an amphitheatre style seating area.

With plenty of strong established dining options already available in the area, the challenge was to quickly position the Guildhall as an attractive dining location and ensure that the small supporting promotional budget delivered the highest return on investment possible.

The Solution

Velocity Worldwide’s marketing agency determined that the best strategy to drive immediate sales for the new food tenants was to develop a strong event proposition that would bring more families to the scheme (the key target audience for the food operators). As with all of Velocity’s shopper strategies, our data, personalisation and insights platform, Darius® was the ‘campaign engine’ used to ensure that all promotional messaging would also support building a robust shopper data segment (in this case, a database of target diners).

The team curated an attractive event programme which included Dino Days, Superhero Days, amongst many more: all designed with the right incentive for families to share their shopper data before arriving on-site (e.g. pre-registration to get VIP event access). The beauty of the campaign was that by capturing event attendee data in advance we could target them with promotional offers for the dining operators they liked, supporting sales spikes on event dates and allowing the marketing team to re-target and attract these people back to the scheme over the year(s) ahead.

The event programme also included a number of community-based activities, which were all developed by the Velocity agency team to deliver further value from the marketing budget; for example, we partnered with the Royal Albert Museum of Exeter to bring educational talks and real fossils to tour Dino Day event– something the attendees really valued.

The Results

  • 9.4% increase in the centre’s shopper database
  • 8.1% footfall increase year-on-year on event dates
  • Food operators saw up to 40% sales uplifts from the events and a sustained increase in footfall between 5-10% over the 12 months following the first event
  • 310% year-on-year growth in engagement via the centre’s social media over the campaign period

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