Recent headlines paint a negative picture of declining footfall across the UK/US/EU retail and leisure destinations. The constant drumming raises pressure on CMO’s and marketing teams to turn the tides back to the often referenced ‘pre-covid’ levels of visitors.
Recent headlines paint a negative picture of declining footfall across the UK/US/EU retail and leisure destinations. The constant drumming raises pressure on CMO’s and marketing teams to turn the tides back to the often referenced ‘pre-covid’ levels of visitors.
The Office of National Statistics reports:
Overall retail footfall remains below the level in the equivalent week of 2019, at 89%, with shopping centre footfall the furthest below at 84%.
There are outliers with the UK South East seeing +3% in footfall in 2023 and specific operators such as Hammerson reporting +3% in footfall across a portfolio of 10 destinations in UK and EU alongside an increased dwell time +5%.
With declining footfall impacting lease values and renewals, shopping centres and destinations find themselves caught between 2 rocks and a hard place - shifting consumer behaviours, a drive for efficiencies and often shrinking budgets.
Why is ths happening? Data from American Express into the consumer behaviour of UK shoppers highlights a common challenge faced by all high streets. Shoppers most desire a mix of retail and leisure offerings on the highstreet.
New research from American Express unveils the high streets offering a compelling mix of shopping and leisure experiences most desired by Brits.
This raises the question of how do High Streets and Shopping Centres reposition themselves? Historically perceived solely as places of commerce, now to destinations for leisure, social, culture and commerce?
Digital channels provide an opportunity for destinations to land multiple repositioning messages to specific audiences. This style of sophisticated mass marketing is an incredibly effective way to build or evolve a destination's brand positioning.
With more detailed reporting, attribution between media spend and footfall alongside granular audience targeting capabilities demand digital marketing become a priority for shopping centres, retailers and destinations.
Unfortunately, a lot of shopping centres struggle to adapt to a digital first world, typically through a lack of investment into the required skill sets or technology to market effectively.
The gap between the marketing activity that worked in the 1970’s during the build boom of UK shopping centres and what’s required today to communicate with the younger demographic is growing. This journey to close the gap is ‘Digital Marketing Transformation” and one we’ll dive into now.
Times have changed. No longer can a shopping centre attract 100,000 visitors on opening day as The Bullring did in 1964, at least not from word of mouth and PR… It’s also increasingly unlikely that the Duke Of Edinburgh is going to attend the opening ceremony!
The opening of the Bullring Shopping Centre, showing the Duke of Edinburgh and company (1964). © Historic England Archive. John Laing Photographic Collection. | View image record JLP01/08/068575
The way brands communicate with their audience is changing and the skill set required to do this effectively is constantly evolving. Ahead of building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your retailer or destination, an assessment of your organisation and its operating model are essential. This is the first step on your path to digital marketing maturity.
Successful digital marketing transformation requires the adoption of digital first solutions by teams across the organisation. This is why we review a businesses operational and organisational model as soon as possible.
For a team to adopt new processes and workflows it must be reflected and embedded across the organisation. These new processes must be wholeheartedly endorsed from the top down. McKinsey determined the biggest indicator for successful digital transformation is buy-in from senior leadership.
The CEO is ultimately the only one who can shape and guide a successful digital transformation.
A lot of brands could benefit from a review of their digital marketing operating models. A revamp should be based on the organisation’s talent and expertise, and not solely looking to include AI for the sake of AI.
The most common operating processes we review is the ‘brand and agency model’.Brands often look to complement their teams talents and processes with agency resources.
There are 3 core retail marketing operating models to consider:
As it says on the tin - strategy, creative, finance, buying, tech and analytics are all handled within the organisation.
✅ This allows for full transparency and promotes accountability.
❌ This is an expensive team to hire, train and up-skill.
Key roles are handled or led by the in house talent but they lean on agency teams to execute, operate and scale. Typically with managed service agencies.
✅ Allows you to scale beyond your in house resource while maintaining transparency.
❌Aligning in house operating model with multiple managed service providers can add inefficiencies.
All digital marketing efforts performed by an agency.
✅ Low staffing commitments
❌ Limited control, transparency and accountability.
The best model to improve a shopping centre's digital marketing depends on a number of variables.
Out top 4 factors to review would be:
Talent bench
Does the organisation have the digital talent to manage the key decisions?
Current model
How complex is the existing model and workflow?
Ambition
Has the digital transformation roadmap been bought into by senior leadership?
Tech capabilities
Does the organisation have departments with relevant skill sets to deploy/maintain the tools required in-house?
Once this review is complete a plan of action can be mapped out based on the potential investment and value add to the business. At this stage conversations should be had to uncover the opportunity for ‘Digital Transformation’ of the organisation outside of the ‘Digital Marketing Transformation’ goals. Clarifying the difference between the two is key.
Digital Transformation and Digital Marketing Transformation are closely aligned and intertwined topics. The leaps in AI adoption are pushing these projects to the top of most shopping centre CMO’s to-do list.
They sound similar, but let's highlight the key differences.
Digital Transformation
Digital Marketing Transformation
The best explanation I’ve heard is:
Now that we have an assessment of the current digital skills within the organisation we can begin plotting a path to digital maturity.
Our 5 step digital marketing transformation journey typically includes the below milestones.
As covered in detail above, this step sets the stage for identifying areas to address: processes, in house talent, agency relationships and objectives for the organisation.
Owning your audience and performance data reduces complexity and streamlines your ability to activate digital marketing campaigns. The increased transparency between the delivery team and the billing team can contribute to reduced slippage and improved efficiency.
As one of only 40 Google Analytics Enterprise Marketing Partners in the UK we can consult and deliver a full implementation and architecture review for you. Achieving this recognition is a true milestone for PATTRNS and required submission of thought leading analytics project reviews, as well as several rounds of interviews with the Google Partner teams.
Once you own all of your data sources, we can remove the barriers to data analysis by providing access across your organisation. Imagine streamlined and seamless reporting dashboards built with live data!
Not only does the data need to be accessible, but also digestible at every level of your team. You’ll often hear this coined as ‘Data Democratisation’.
PATTRNS has facilitated a number of data democratisation projects with carefully considered data points and UX considerations. It’s usually one of the first 3 key milestones in our digital marketing transformation projects.
With reliable and accessible datasets we begin to build audience baskets to communicate to across key channels - TikTok, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Snapchat.
This foundation allows your marketing teams to develop strategies to attract specific cohorts with tailored communications and creative. No longer will you be forced to adopt the ‘Shotgun’ approach to marketing.
Some of our most digitally mature destinations can leverage advancements in AI CCTV systems to measure the impact of certain audience activity on the demographics contributing to your footfall.
Whether it’s ideation, production or optimisation we see that creative is the bottleneck for shopping centres or destinations. PATTRNS in collaboration with Google Enterprise Marketing support are able to tailor a solution to remove this bottle neck.
One of the most effective ways to deliver best in class creative for regional destinations requires a combination of local social-first content creators and a central creative strategy team leaning into AI scaled executions.
Combining a data led audience strategy with relevant creative significantly increases the effectiveness of your digital marketing. Relevant creative can 3x the attention paid to video ads.
An agile local social media content creator can ensure timely creative production for a wide range of events at your destination:
PATTRNS deliver cutting edge digital marketing transformation roadmaps and projects for enterprise brands including Hammerson, WD40 and O’Keeffe’s. With unparalleled support and recognition from Google's Enterprise Marketing team we are able to develop a tailored solution to navigate your leisure destination or shopping centre through the digital minefields.
