In July 2021 we began working with The Grow Centre, an indoor plant retailer with multiple stores across Sydney and Brisbane. They sought our help to manage and improve their social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Their main focus was on increasing followers across their social media platforms, in order to raise awareness of their brand and in turn increase sales.

The Target: 

Consumers who like plants and nature, and people looking to re-decorate their interiors.

The Background: 

• We started working with The Grow Centre during the peak of Covid and through Australia’s ‘second wave’ which involved restrictions across Sydney and Brisbane.
• The Grow Centre did not have an online shop set up, so sales were unable to proceed for some time while stores were closed.
• The Grow Centre tried setting up a temporary online shopping option which involved customers sending an online form to request an order of specific plants, which were then packaged up and contactlessly picked up by the customer on the agreed date/time. However, consumers still wanted the option to go and select their plants and therefore the process was not working as succinctly as it should have.

The Challenge:

• Increase social media followers on Facebook and Instagram.
• Increase sales in general (limited to in store sales as there is no option available (yet) for online sales).
• Facebook and Instagram have made it very hard to organically grow as they have moved away from encouraging businesses to gain likes and follows, but rather to concentrate on increasing engagement rates on the platform (as essentially these channels are a 'social' and 'conversational' medium). Engagement consists of viewing images, reading content (so being on the post longer than a certain number of seconds), clicking on a link, commenting or liking the post.

The Strategy: 

With the above in mind our key strategy is to increase brand awareness and engagement across Facebook and Instagram in order to ultimately then increase follower rates. Using a combination of both organic and paid content to achieve this goal our tasks included:

1. The creation of monthly organic social media content plans which consist of 1 post across Facebook and Instagram every day of every month. Creation of this plan also includes the sourcing and compilation of all content included in the plan.
2. 1 x consultant site visit per month to one of The Grow Centre stores. The TLS consultant will capture footage for use in social media content plan.
3. Creation and set up of paid marketing campaigns which are optimised monthly to ensure best performance. Current ad campaigns include 1 x Page Likes Campaign, 1 x Re-targeting Traffic Campaign, and 1 x Brand Awareness Campaign on Instagram only.

The Results:

• On Instagram, followers have increased from 15,067 to 17,752 over the course of just 6 months. This is an increase of 17.8%.
• On Facebook, followers have increased from 17,036 to 20,870 over the course of 6 months. This is an increase of 22.5%.
• Engagement rate on Instagram has increased from 0.36 to 0.46 on Instagram, which is a 27% increase.
• The click through rate for our Page Likes campaign was 2.5% and cost just $0.14 per click. The click through rate of the Traffic Re-targeting campaign was 3.13% and cost just $0.25 per click. Both of these ads are performing incredibly well compared to the industry average for Facebook Ads which sits at 1.59% click through rates and $0.70 per click.
• The Instagram only engagement ad had a click through rate of 0.88% and led to an additional 26,963 people engaging with The Grow Centre Instagram page. The cost was $0.01c per engagement.