Case Story: Nicolson’s Bar & Kitchen Advertising Campaign

The Brief

Nicolson’s Bar & Kitchen are a recent addition to Inverclyde’s hospitality sector, opening in late spring of 2019. The bar commissioned me on a digital strategy and content creation retainer to help develop the brand’s tone of voice online, implement advertising campaigns and create high quality photographic and video content for use on social media.

The Execution

I delivered Nicolson's sustainable digital strategy guide and staff training, aimed at allowing the bar to manage their day to day social media internally while I served in an advisory role and implemented continuous top level advertising campaigns, as well as event/seasonal specific marketing.

The retainer also included a half day photography and video shoot once a month, which was used to generate new high quality multimedia content for use throughout these campaigns and across the company website, currently under development.

These shoots were a mix of considered editorial (eg. food & drink photography) and candid, event photography & filming aimed at showcasing the atmosphere at Nicolson’s in an authentic manner.

Social advertising targeted the local area using highly developed customer personas to ensure the bar’s budget was spent putting content in front of the right people, in the right place at the right time. Individuals who then interacted with the top level advertising content were retargeted for event specific campaigns and used to generate lookalike audiences to help the brand even more of their target demographic.

The Results

Since the end of April 2019 Nicolson’s have grown their page audiences across Facebook and Instagram by over 2.5K followers to 3.6K in less than a year.

During that time, paid advertising from the bar has been seen over 178k times by over 26K people directly within the bar’s target demographic. Over 28.7K minutes of video content produced for Nicolson’s has been watched across Facebook and Instagram totalling over 87.4K views.

For every penny spent by the bar someone performed a valuable action such as a like, comment, share or video view.

For a piece of content to be seen over 1,000 times by the target audience the cost was less than £3 with a unique Click Through Rate (CTR) of 12.32%, well above the average 2-3%.

This first years activity saw the new bar, starting at zero, come up on the heels of it’s local competitors who had several years headstart, consistently matching or out performing them week on week in both engagement and building their audience.