Enhancing Chatham’s social presence

The Challenge

In the fast-paced realm of social media, Chatham, a leading country, outdoor and sailing footwear fashion brand, embarked on a new journey to enhance its social media strategy. Recognising the immense potential of social media to elevate brand presence and engagement, Chatham entrusted ADPR to orchestrate digital symphony across their Instagram and Facebook channels. Chatham's core objectives reflected harnessing the power of social media to establish a distinctive voice and face behind the brand, highlight new launches and signature British styles, craftsmanship and innovation, all whilst connecting with key target audiences. Aspiring to build brand awareness, foster meaningful engagement, and ultimately drive website traffic and sales conversions, ADPR took on the responsibility of Chatham’s social media channels in addition to existing management of the brand’s PR, to disseminate consistent messaging and content across all owned, earned and social channels.

The Solution

Working to the brief, ADPR got to work crafting compelling content plans in alignment with a succinct new strategy, tailored to Chatham’s Facebook and Instagram pages. ADPR devised a comprehensive approach by utilising social media listening to seamlessly jump on the latest fashion trends, whilst creating a constant flow of inspiring and engaging content with the key target audiences in mind. Leveraging captivating visuals, design graphics, engaging videos, and impactful storytelling, ADPR showcased Chatham’s commitment to quality and style through proactive posting, whilst also ensuring efficient reactive communications with customers via comments, direct messages, and reviews. Following the Pareto Principle (80/20 content split), 80% of the social strategy combines fun, inspiring, and engaging content that resonates with the target audience to build a strong relationship. This included employee spotlights, company stories or initiatives, highlighting attendance at shows or events, product updates and launches, industry awareness days, competitions, valuable insight, and interactive stories. The remaining 20% of content pushed promotional messaging, encouraging sales, discounts, direct sales promotion and highlighting product benefits with clear calls to action, such as purchasing a product or discounts.

An integral component of social media communications management included ideas generation for campaigns and content. For example, ADPR built and managed working relationships with key influencers who have vast word-of-mouth in Chatham’s focus sectors, to initiate product seeding which generated encapsulating user-generated content. ADPR also optimised Chatham’s brand ambassadors for exclusive, behind-the-scenes content, as well as event support to enhance social presence at key shows. Key performance indicators (KPIs) were set for the first six months of managing Chatham’s Instagram and Facebook by analysing benchmarks, with the goal of achieving 1,000 new followers and an engagement increase of 20%.

The Results

In just six months, ADPR conquered Chatham’s social media landscape, captivating audiences and boosting brand identity. Through the meticulous execution of the social media strategy, Chatham witnessed a remarkable transformation in just six months. The brand experienced a substantial increase in followers and engagement across all platforms, catapulting its online presence to new heights. Chatham’s posts achieved impressive reach, above and beyond the 20% engagement increase KPI, resulting in a 50% like increase, 200% comment increase and 300% link click increase of engagement on Facebook; and a 20% like increase, 150% comment increase and 200% save increase of engagement from content shared on Instagram. Not only did engagement increase wildly above set KPIs, but in the first six months, ADPR successfully attained more than 1,200 new followers – 20% more followers than the initial KPI.

Generating a significant buzz within the fashion, country and outdoor communities captured the attention of influencers. Having set boundaries for Chatham’s influencer seeding programme, ADPR orchestrated more than 10 influencer marketing opportunities, producing ever-green user-generated content. In addition, ADPR hosted a Christmas competition on Chatham’s social media channels, which was a great success, generating a reach of more than 8,000. Through an innovative blend of captivating content, tailored audience targeting, and responsive engagement, ADPR successfully transformed Chatham’s social media presence in just six months and was asked to continue managing the brand’s social media for the foreseeable future.