Tenant Focus with Annapolis Town Center
The Annapolis Town Center is an open-air, mixed-use property boasting a plethora of stores, restaurants, and businesses. Combining commerce and culture, the Town Center regularly holds a variety of events, both big and small, to provide the local community with opportunities to gather and participate in supporting their tenants. When COVID hit, there was a lot of uncertainty about how stores and companies would move forward. At that moment, the Annapolis Town Center made a commitment to be ready and able to support their tenants any way they could.
As Maryland slowly began to lift restrictions and allow for more retail opportunities, Symmetry created the Return to Retail campaign. This campaign aimed at highlighting specific tenants and the new processes they put in place to make shopping safe and easy for all guests. We focused on capturing the mechanics of how each tenant specifically conducted business, their new offerings, and the overall specials they were implementing to help entice their audience to make purchases.
In order to accurately convey each of the individual stores’ commitment to the community, we developed storylines, messaging, and a personalized marketing communication strategy to showcase each tenant’s own response to the challenges brought on by the ongoing pandemic. We began with written blog articles highlighting specific tenants, as well as articles featuring three key categories in which guests could interact with tenants and shop. These categories included Virtual Shopping Experiences, Shop By Appointment, and Curbside Pick-Up Zones. Each of the Town Center’s retailers fell within one of those three categories and the individual articles we drafted enabled us to communicate effectively and easily in one sole location for guests.
The next step in the campaign was to create videos that clearly communicated how each tenant was facilitating a safe shopping environment. Using video allowed us to provide a face and personality to each retailer; providing the audience with a more personable and engaging experience. As each content piece promoted the tenants themselves, the primary focus remained on new safety procedures. Key questions as seen below were some of the prompts our team provided the store representatives during their shoot:
- What new precautions and procedures has your store implemented to ensure a safe shopping experience?
- What response/support have you received from the community?
- What can we expect going forward?
We know effective storytelling builds trust with current customers and develops a connection with potential audiences. As the store owners spoke about their business, we could see their faces light up. It wasn’t hard to get them to talk about their connection with the community and to show how much the Town Center customers meant to their local businesses.
In order to generate the largest reach for this campaign, we pushed all content pieces via digital ads, the Town Center’s social channels, website, and email. Overall the content received high and effective engagement results. Followers spent a considerable amount of time reading over the tenant blogs, the search ads resulted in high click-through rates and quality traffic, and email communication efforts saw a higher open rate than usual. All of these results ended in a positive experience for the tenants, the guests, and the property as a whole.
