Transforming Tennants Auctioneers into a digital first business.
The creation and implementation of a digital strategy designed to revolutionise Tennant’s customer base.
With over 100 years of history, Tennants are the UK’s leading regional auction house, holding around 100 auctions a year.
Jaywood were appointed by Tennants in 2014 to define, design and implement the digital strategy for their primary website, www.tennants.co.uk. Since then, we have delivered best-practice organic search, innovative and sector leading paid media marketing and transformed their customer demographics.
At heart, Tennants is a family business with the third and fourth generations of the family running the business. Their commitment to their customers is deep and they were determined to ensure that their customers received the same high quality experience online that they deliver in person.
In addition to providing features like online bidding, personalised sale bulletins and digital valuations, Tennants see their website as key to attracting new customers and reaching their audiences.
The Solution
STRONGER ORGANIC PERFORMANCE
Tennants’ website was well established and already well used. They’d been heavily reliant on offline advertising and had been investing almost all of their marketing budget there. As far as digital acquisition channels went, organic search was all there was, which made it essential that it was achieving its potential.
We carried out a wide-reaching optimisation project, identifying the most important pages on the website as well as the ones that were delivering the most search engine traffic. We made the website search friendly and keyword focused, introducing additional best practice items like rich snippets and semantic data, ensuring that Tennants benefitted from having a website that was inline with modern search marketing practice.
We then introduced an onsite blog, showcasing the depth and breadth of knowledge within the business. Regular, targeted and customer focused content, written in a way that was engaging and accessible helped to drive traffic volumes upward, increase the overall website engagement and bring the average age of the online audience down.
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
If Tennants had a challenge, it was the demographic of their online audience. A traditional business with a long-standing, community driven reputation found itself reliant on an audience of post-retirement customers who felt no need to use digital channels. If a digital strategy were to succeed, then it would have to engage with a younger audience. Reaching a new audience required driving the Tennants brand forward.
We implemented an online display advertising campaign designed to increase brand awareness among online communities aged 35 to 55. Using a range of creative threads, the campaign advertises key sales, specialist departments and moments of interest. Retargeting is used to maintain audience engagement when a conversion has not been achieved.
BECOMING SOCIAL
Reaching a younger audience cannot be achieved without paying attention to social media marketing. We worked closely with the Tennants marketing team to help them make the necessary steps into the social world.
From creating their social network accounts and pages, to training the team on how to post, manage and update the channels, we took Tennants through each step. They’re now fully fledged social natives. Instagram and Facebook are now a core component of the digital strategy and activity, with frequent posts, strong engagement and excellent audience feedback.
EVOLUTION AND GROWTH
Any business that’s been around as long as Tennants understands the need to evolve, move with the times and not let the grass grow under your feet. They’ve moved with the times for the last 100 years and they’re not about to stop now.
Through our analytically driven strategy, close working relationship and proactive approach, we’re constantly evolving and developing Tennants’ digital strategy. New channels and techniques are being brought into the mix all of the time and new customer touch-points are appearing all the time.
Total Annual Sessions
1.1M website sessions per year.
Overall On-site Conversion
From 0-10,000 in less than 2 years.
PPC Cost Per Click Reduction
Email newsletters sign-ups in 2019
Total Auctions Promoted
Auction sales promoted.
Jim Woodhead
Managing Director
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