UK Awareness Growth for a large British brand

Challenges

Moto Hospitality, the UK’s largest motorway service area provider, have a complex communications environment, communicating to multiple driver personas at any one time, with a 24 hour, 365 days a year commitment to Britain’s road users. With over 12million drivers every year pulling in for a rest stop at Moto, there’s lots to tell customers to make their service station breaks as enjoyable as possible.

They needed assistance with brand activation and guardianship, social media communications, email marketing and digital marketing strategy that would support their internal team, as well as the agencies also working on the framework across PR, sign installation, web and their mobile app.

Solution

We worked closely with Moto’s Marketing Manager to collaborate on developing a complex, busy social media calendar that incorporated all of the key messaging internal stakeholders needed to share, as well as brand messaging from the plethora of household names within the Moto family, including Burger King, Costa, KFC, Greggs, M&S Simply Food and Pret. We used Miro, an accessible, intuitive, digital whiteboarding tool, to keep messaging planned, monitor progress and allow flexibility.

Using a third party social media scheduling tool alongside native networks, we developed a community management system to engage drivers and support with customer service requests and we used analytics to inform when and where we posted to reach the different demographics within our wide-ranging audience.

We took the lead on all social media creative, developing templates for consistency, and where necessary, breaking brand conventions to create strong breakthrough of message where it was vital that key communications reached drivers. We also developed and maintained a digital brand portal, for internal and external marketing teams to upload branded materials to, giving site managers and on the ground colleagues access to marketing and safety messaging that was on brand and simple to access. We supplemented this with custom digital signage across the 50+ sites in Moto’s network.

For greater, targeted communication with the Moto network, we established, grew and maintained a database of over 120,000 engaged marketing contacts that we communicated with via email. We managed and analysed the data to ensure we were only ever talking to people who were engaging with us, whilst simultaneously learning more about our audience and how they like to consume our messaging.

Impact

Our integrated approach proved incredibaly successful: we grew Moto’s year on year digital brand impressions by 35%, being seen online in excess of 13.6million times, generating 2.5million engagements on social media, with over 12,600 incoming social media messages received. Whatsmore, we bucked industry trends when it comes to social media: where the wider hospitality and leisure industry saw an audience loss of 10% across Facebook, ours grew by 3.5%, and we grew Moto’s corporate brand presence on LinkedIn by 24%, against an industry average of 11%. Elesewhere, Moto’s email open rate increased by 53% and over 7million emails from Moto landed in customers inboxes.