Case Study
1
THE BRIEF
Rocksalt needed a website that would reflect his high end, yet informal, new restaurant in Folkestone - Rocksalt.
In addition, the Rocksalt Group wanted to ensure that the marketing, PR and social media presence mirrored Rocksalt’s image as a successfully integrated business within the local community, whilst putting the town firmly on the foodie map.
2
THE APPROACH
From the outset we wanted to ensure that the website, newsletter and social media adhered to two core values; user experience and return of investment for the client.
Design
For Rocksalt’s website, we wanted the design approach to showcase the incredible location and the restaurant’s unique selling offering. To do this, we chose not to use a traditional image gallery, but to instead turn the whole site into a image gallery, with the backgrounds displaying high quality images of Rocksalt as well as Folkestone. In addition, the user experience was enhanced with a cleanly designed navigation in order to direct visitors to the appropriate areas. This included both newsletter sign-up and restaurant booking functionality widgets.
Newsletter
Kit & Caboodle designed and provided support for Rocksalt’s monthly e-mail broadcast by creating a valuable marketing platform. The newsletter was designed with two objectives relating to the core values; the first being to drive interest to what’s on offer at Rocksalt, and the second was to reward users who open and read the newsletter by providing recipes.
Getting Social
Rocksalt’s social media had two clear aims. The first was to get the local community engaged with Rocksalt and the second was to assist with driving footfall into the restaurant. Kit & Caboodle took care of the social media before Rocksalt was open for business, which created a fantastic opportunity for us to tell Rocksalt’s story right from the beginning. It was important to us to be able to talk about the development of the restaurant, as this involved the local community from the outset.
Once the restaurant was open, the social media focus needed to shift to what Rocksalt was offering, while at the same time being mindful of not putting followers off with overselling, so this took a behind-the-scenes approach by showing off the produce with the use of ‘food porn’.
3
THE OUTCOME
It's been a massive success! During the first 12 months, Rocksalt's website received over 10,000 people visiting per month, and it now has a database of 8,000 email addresses with which to send targeted newsletters. Furthermore, the social media strategy achieved outstanding results within the first 6 months through both Rocksalt's Facebook page, which had over 2,700 likes, as well as their Twitter account, which had over 2,200 followers all actively engaging, which effectively increased on-demand footfall.