Summary
Marketing agency Tangerine’s Bricks or Banter (BOB) email and magazine campaign for Jewson has launched the brand as a publisher – giving them a unique tone of voice in the industry to engage existing and new customers. The company’s print magazine has a circulation of 20,000 and an email open rate which outstrips the industry average. The campaign uses audience insight to engage target customers with relevant and entertaining content, available when and where they want it to build engagement with the trade.
About Jewson and Tangerine
Jewson is a leading UK builders’ merchant with branches from the Scottish Isles to Penzance. The first branch opened in 1836 and since then Jewson has been providing tradespeople with the tools and materials they need day-in and day-out.
PR, digital and social media agency Tangerine is employee-owned and strives to be better at what it does for its clients and each other. It devises insight-led strategic campaigns which create stand out among key audiences and ultimately deliver against business and marketing objectives.
Strategy
Jewson is an established name in the construction industry and recognised by most tradespeople. However, maintaining its market share in an increasingly competitive market is a challenge, so increasing engagement with customers is essential. The construction industry as a whole has been impacted by a turbulent period of economic uncertainty. From a chronic skills shortage to increasingly demanding tenders and, ultimately, tighter profit margins.
As a result, Jewson’s core builder audience is changing and brand loyalty is no longer guaranteed. Grabbing the attention of audiences is more important than ever, so Jewson needed to ensure its messages were not only relevant to the state of the industry but also resonated with customer needs.
Objectives of the campaign
Tangerine and Jewson worked together to develop a content-focused strategy that would engage builders, and ultimately encourage them to spend more.
The two specific objectives were:
- Secure Jewson’s future customer base by increasing engagement with younger builders (tradespeople aged 18-30).
- Support this audience by offering technical product advice that demonstrates added value and drives brand engagement.
The target audience
Jewson and Tangerine carried out research into the attitudes of tradespeople towards their jobs and the wider industry.
Findings suggested some younger builders can find builders’ merchants intimidating, opting for online or retail-style building materials suppliers. While there’s still a demand for traditional, printed trade media, a proportion of this age group aren’t reading trade publications. Information is often sourced online from a number of sites, but paper catalogues are still picked up in builders’ merchants.
A traditional communications campaign wouldn’t cut it for a younger age group, as print and online trade media doesn’t consistently reach this audience. In fact, research indicated that there was a lack of any singular, go-to platform where young builders could find engaging content tailored to their individual needs. There was a gap for an entirely new channel of its own to reach this target audience. This channel needed to deliver entertaining and informative content to demonstrate the added value a traditional merchant could offer young builders, and demonstrate Jewson as an approachable partner for young builders.
Media, channels or techniques used
Meet BOB. Standing for Bricks or Banter, BOB is Jewson’s online and print publication. Combining both traditional print and digital offerings, it gives customers a refreshing mix of lifestyle pieces alongside technical information, advice and product deals via a monthly newsletter and twice-yearly print magazine.
The content in BOB is designed to be shareable across Jewson social media and its blog, to feed into the organisation’s wider social media campaign, and to maximise engagement with the content. Content is regularly sourced from and tested on social channels to maximise engagement, as well as ensure the relevance to target audiences.
When designing the first email issue, the editorial team devised different layout concepts, and tested them with target audiences to gauge their appeal, before agreeing a successful design. Jewson invested in a range of original content, including dedicated videos, infographics, celebrity interviews and more.
The newsletter has also been designed to promote trade deals from Jewson to help the brand meet its commercial objectives. To ensure the ongoing success of BOB, Tangerine evaluates every piece of content on a monthly basis, with learnings incorporated into the next issue. Distribution timing is also tested to determine the best time of day to achieve the maximum open rate.
In 2017, Tangerine found there was an increasing switch towards mobile viewing of BOB, so created a mobile-first design of BOB. This included improved coding to suit smartphone users and a stripped back creative direction that was better suited to small screens.
Timescales of the campaign
- The campaign began with focus groups to learn more about the target audiences.
- The email was then launched in February 2016, with the first magazine released at Jewson Live (a national customer event) in December 2016.
- Reporting has taken place on a monthly basis, with insights and learnings applied immediately.
Results
Since launching BOB in August 2016, there’s been high levels of engagement with the brand. Circulation of the magazine has continued to grow – with print distribution alone increasing from 3000 in the first issue, to 20,000 in December 2017.
In 2017, the monthly emails had an average open rate of 26.58%, 2% above the industry average which was the benchmark set as a KPI. While click-throughs to the website were over 5000 across the year, and the average dwell time was over a minute. Pushing the content through social channels has also helped enrich the wider social media strategy and contributed towards an increase in Facebook likes of over 6000 in 2017 alone.
The age profile of Jewson Facebook followers has also subsequently decreased, with 42% of fans under 34 in December 2017, compared to 18% in January 2016.
Furthermore, BOB has provided a commercial opportunity for Jewson as the builders’ merchant is able to sell advertising space to suppliers to feature in the magazine and e-newsletter. In 2018, it is predicted that sales of advertising space will make the print magazine cost-neutral to produce.
“In a traditional industry like construction, communications need to be forward thinking and dynamic to get cut through, and with BOB, Tangerine does just that. From design to content, BOB is fresh and vibrant, but most importantly, engages our customers. BOB is an industry-leading example of how B2B communications don’t have to be corporate and boring, and communications can have personality and generate results”
