Swansgate is a community shopping centre situated in the heart of Wellingborough providing the only covered retail facility within the town. Covering 285,000 sq ft and with 63 tenants, Swansgate was struggling to present their offering within the surrounding community. With no major anchor store, lack of ‘wow’ factor for both younger and more upmarket shoppers and the opening of competition only 4.5 miles away, Swansgate required an innovative marketing strategy to increase community engagement and footfall within their centre.
February 2019 was the year Toolbox Marketing was appointed to provide full-service outsourced marketing. Toolbox Marketing aimed to utilise Swansgate’s Shopping Centre marketing improve the performance of the centre including event management, tenant liaison, PR, creative, website, social media management, monthly reporting and onsite visits.
Toolbox Marketing positioned Swansgate as your local, friendly, easy and reliable choice for value shopping. To create that real community feel, increased engagement and increased footfall Toolbox Marketing created new campaigns whilst revamping Swansgate’s existing campaigns. The aim was to create a refreshed feel to target the younger demographic, in conjunction with keeping that familiar and reliable personality the centre previously portrayed.
Objectives | Result | Difference |
Increase the occupier survey score for events & promotions | 3.7 average score | +0.7% YOY+0.1% above the average Savills scheme |
Increase the occupier survey score for marketing | 3.9 average score | +0.5% YOY+0.2% above the average Savills scheme |
Increase the awareness of Savills Insight app | 92% of tenants are aware of the app | +42% higher than the average Savills scheme |
Increase dwell time by 5% | +25% increase in dwell timecompared to previous research in 2014 | +20% |
Create a database of 350 members to the Cygnets kids club within a year | 560 members, with over 25% of members attending the events regularly | +60% |
Drive visitors to the new website, increasing unique visitors by 5% from launch | +46% increase in unique visitors | +41% |
Increase social media followers by 10% | +18% increase in followers across the 3 channels | +8% |
Encourage engagement on social media with a 15% increase | +61% increase in engagements across the 3 channels | +46% |
Engage with 75% of tenants on a regular basis | +88.89% of tenants are active on Mallcomm | +13.89% |
Jo Chapman, Centre Administrator at Swansgate Shopping Centre says: “Toolbox are providing us with full-service marketing services and we have been very impressed with their creativity. Insights have also been a very valuable tool for us and they have undoubtedly helped us to get the best out of it. The results of our annual occupier survey show just how far we have come in the year we have been working with Toolbox. We look forward to many more successful years working together”.
Read more of our shopping centre marketing categories here: Event overview, Digital overview and Creativity overview.