THE CLIENT
Excelsior Wholesale are a florist wholesaler, located in Drayton. They specialise in floristry, artificial, dried and accessories within the floristry industry. Excelsior’s target audience are aspiring florists who are looking to buy in bulk – they also work with experienced florists.
THE WORK
Pre- Takeover
We took over the social media of Excelsior Wholesale around August – September of 2020. Around this time Excelsior’s Instagram had a reach of 17 and their Facebook had a reach of 730.
In our first month of fully managing their Facebook and Instagram we grew their Instagram numbers by over 104.9% and their Facebook reach by 21.6%.
Excelsior often struggled to upload and stay active on their Instagram but continued to use their Facebook page. Therefore, there is such a massive growth on their Instagram. We consistently posted on their Instagram and Facebook, which consistency grew their following every month.
We created a weekly social media schedule and we upped the amount that they were originally posting per week. We increased promotions of their products, focusing on specific products based on the season.
We struggled to post strong images of their actual product photos because the only images available to us were stock images, which were very bland. To counteract this issue, we travelled to Excelsior’s Warehouse and took new and useable product photos, allowing us to create better uploads for their social channels.
There was also a lack of engagement with their customers, who were trying to message them through their direct inboxes on Facebook and Instagram, but were being pushed aside as they were too busy to reply to them without a team. This caused customers to feel ignored and find another supplier. From the minute we took over we made sure that these customers felt welcomed and responded to every direct message that was sent our way.
Since counteracting these challenges which we had initially faced, we started to see a pattern of growth each month, with an increase in engagement and following.
The Competition
In February of 2021, we started a competition, the aim of which was to help small businesses who may have struggled throughout the pandemic. We offered an incentive of a £20 gift card to spend in store. This gave the customers and competitors the incentive to enter our competition and tag us in more competition posts.
We initially started the competition on the 26th of February. This then caught the attention of many businesses and hundreds of entries had piled up.
The competition did extremely well for Excelsior, with more and more customers sharing their creations whilst also promoting the company’s page, creating a domino effect that increased the page’s following massively.
We started interacting with their customers online more often, commenting on images that our account had been tagged in, resharing and tagging businesses who were using Excelsior’s products, giving them more exposure, on both our website and social media.
THE RESULTS
These are the statistics of the previous year that we did not manage their social media, based over the year period between August 2019 – September 2020. As you can see, their Instagram account was barely used, with a reach of only 239 in the year, whereas their main social platform, Facebook, still performed well, but not as optimised as they would hope.
These are the results are since we have taken over Excelsior’s social media accounts, based on when we initially took over the account until now, September 2020 – October 2021. As you can see, there is a considerable boost in reach on both Facebook and Instagram, with Instagram having a growth of over 1000% from the previous year. It just goes to show, with a bit of optimisation and engagement, a business can flourish online.