Early in 2019 Saltaire Brewery commissioned Social Progress to help us proactively manage our social media activity as a key marketing communication. Having developed organically over a number of years, our rebrand in 2018 was a trigger for making sure that the Brewery’s social media presence championed the new look brand, its tone of voice and marketing objectives.
We’ve now worked with Social Progress, for over a year and through regular meetings, conversations and analytic reports, we think it’s going really well. We’ve seen an increase in engagement and reach across all our social media channels, and their advice and input has enabled us to do more with the channels than we had before. We’re also appreciating who our customers are through social media and are doing more to help them to connect with Saltaire Brewery – who we are, what we do and what our customers can expect from us as a company. We believe that this foundation has helped us meet the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis.
Social media has become even more important to us through the COVID-19 crisis. When the hospitality industry closed due to the pandemic, Saltaire Brewery needed to react quickly and change its operations from delivery to pubs, bars, restaurants and shops to launch a free home delivery service. Thanks to our whole team’s flexibility and willingness to back the idea, it was up and running within the first week of lockdown. We started deliveries in selected Leeds and Bradford postcodes, but it soon expanded across West Yorkshire. Social media proved crucial to the Brewery to market the new service to our followers and, without a doubt, it has driven our sales success from the start.
Since the start of lockdown, we have also developed an online shop. Social Progress suggested that we integrate a pixel code into our new e-commerce website to set up and track traffic to the website from Facebook and Instagram. Doing this meant that we could see how a £50 budget for Facebook advertising generated more than £5500 in orders through our online shop.
Our relationship with Social Progress has definitely helped the Brewery build its social media presence and engagement with audiences. Through working together, we’ve found that we have expanded on our knowledge of social media while being able to draw on the experience of the agency. It gives us what we feel is the ‘best of both worlds’.
