Reimagining Social Media for Shopping Centres

August was not a very good month for us here at LEMOK; we lost one of our major clients and that left a huge dent. But you know what? I’m glad it happened — it forced us to re-look and re-imagine our business.
So as you can imagine, we took some time off to evaluate and strategize our offering. One thing that became apparent to us was that we need to do more to assist Shopping Centre Marketing Managers solve their pain-points. One pain-point we have been pondering on, is the effectiveness of social media marketing for shopping centres. We have to be honest here, we run a few social media accounts for a few shopping centres but we always find ourselves questioning how else could we do this. I mean as much as we may try, as agencies, to *BS* clients, the truth is, it is all the same (and looks the same).
When we were doing research for our CEO’s SACSC Research Conference talk, about 62% of our survey respondents conveyed that they actually never know about campaigns/promotions/competitions ran by shopping centres. Maybe this is why campaign participation is usually around 1–2% of footfall — our audience simply doesn’t know.
So for the past 3 days, we have been on a quest to find out why this is the case and we came up with a few reasons:
- Audiences would rather engage retailers directly than shopping centres, on social media.
- Social media content for shopping centres is sales-orientated by nature and provides little to no incentive for engagement.
- People no longer trust ads but they trust people — essentially why influencer marketing and Facebook recommendations work — and this affects the effectiveness of campaigns.
So how do we mitigate this?
INTRODUCING MALLS OF SOUTH AFRICA (MoSA)
People no longer trust ads, but they do trust people. More accurately, they trust a voice of authority.
MoSA, by LEMOK, is a platform housed on Instagram and Facebook. We created these pages to become an “influencer” on shopping centres in South Africa and create a different narrative around what shopping centre marketing is at the moment.
How does it work? The first part is the content — content around MoSA is based on profiling South African shopping centres the same way travel bloggers would profile holiday destinations, hotels, restaurants etc and garner a following with the same interest. So our content producers, with the permission of Marketing Managers, would visit different shopping centres around the country and post “reality show” kind of content around what makes each centre special and worth visiting. This is at no cost to the centre.
The second part is advertising and reach — MoSA’s main mission to help shopping centres reach (and engage) bigger audiences by advertising shopping centre campaigns/promotions on a freemium model. This is to the audience’s benefit as it has been ascertained that most people are simply unaware of campaigns/promotions happening at shopping centres.
We launched an advertising campaign on both Facebook & Instagram, a few days ago, to get people “liking” and “following” the MoSA pages.
We are now looking for shopping centres that are currently running campaigns. Send us your campaign artwork and mechanics and we’ll include them as part of our September 2018 content, and for the month of September we will even “boost” your campaigns to your catchment areas at NO COST.
We are also in the process of planning our first shopping centre visits and we ask Shopping Centre Marketing Managers that are interested in giving us permission to profile their shopping centres, to get in touch with our CEO, Lebogang Mokubela, via lebogang@lemokgroup.co.za
You can also “follow” and “like” MoSA pages via these links: Facebook | Instagram
