Cafe Lighting & Living (CL&L) is a family owned wholesale furnishings, lighting and accessories company, with showrooms in Sydney and Melbourne, that distributes nationally. Having operated for 25 years, the CL&L team prides itself on the quality and on-trend nature of its products, combined with a strong history of exceptional customer service.
CL&L approached pepper for support in setting their marketing activity back on course.
The team certainly doesn’t lack product knowledge or passion for what they do. But with many staff focused on buying, new ranges and major trade events, marketing often took a back seat. CL&L recognised the value of having an external team review the operating market and their main business opportunities, and to construct a range of strategies that would be implemented by the in-house team.
In the short term, pepper also provided our services as an outsourced marketing team while the new structure was being ironed out.
We quickly surmised that gaps in marketing across several mediums was in fact a testament to the way in which CL&L run their business.
They focus on their strong and long-held relationships and the business did very well as a result. But with the market growing in competition and the way in which people purchasing shifting, there was a need to transform the marketing effort.
With the luxury of a whole team dedicated to the cause, we split our resources into two key areas: strategy formulation, and day-to-day social media management. The focus on strategy centred on identifying where CL&L was positioned in the market and finding a constructive and feasible plan for initiating a range of new marketing activity within the business. This required us to write several documents including an overall marketing strategy, a dedicated social media strategy and a communications and events plan specifically for the company’s 25th anniversary celebrations and events across the year.
The website was a separate focus, as we conducted a website analysis using Hotjar, followed by an SEO audit and comprehensive 80-page report on our findings, including prioritised recommendations for quick wins and long-term gains. We provided the CL&L team with an email marketing review that analysed the past year’s email content and performance, looking for segmentation and increased revenue opportunities, as well as devising a strategy for the content of the emails.
A significant part of the CL&L budget has historically been allocated to attending key trade fairs that facilitate the all-important face-to-face interaction with clients and enable the team to showcase their new collections and key products. Pepper worked with CL&L to develop a thorough trade fair campaign plan that specified pre, during and post event communications, data collection and analysis and social media content and management. All the documents presented to the client were developed so that staff internal to the CL&L business could follow them and implement the activities and recommendations.
When it came to social media, the CL&L team had a very simple request: to prioritise the look of their Instagram page, as this was the most important social platform for their business. We set about creating a practical and thorough guide for styling Instagram posts.
This directed the pepper team in understanding the look of the brand and was also quickly implemented internally at CL&L across the team. The result: consistent, beautiful and on-brand imagery.
Providing social media management services for CL&L involved creating all content across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google My Business. Drawing on a comprehensive suite of products, collections and offers within the CL&L inventory, we had fun working with both posts and stories to share the look of the huge range of product, while also creating a more personal and behind-the-scenes appearance on their LinkedIn account.
A vital part of social is community management and implementing tactics to increase engagement and add value for the audience. Pepper developed a framework for competitions to be conducted through social platforms and set up contact with a variety of industry individuals who will provide valuable partnerships for CL&L moving forward.
With such a large and beautiful range, we wanted to make the buyers’ hard work come to life through content marketing. With the release of their new season’s collection, we worked with the CL&L team to develop a digital look book that was used as a lead generation piece for those attending the trade show. It was also a follow up mechanism to maintain contact with clients and to help identify the best pieces for their own designs, styles and commissions.
To complete this work, we delivered a range of other content marketing pieces and campaigns to be implemented by CL&L through their own marketing automation set up.
Complementing the above efforts that went into the trade show campaign, our team produced a video to be aired throughout the event that drove additional contacts to sign up for more information.
Using the ManyChat Facebook messenger platform, we also automated delivery of our look book, asking visitors to simply scan a QR code to receive the book.
Online reputation is a vital component of digital presence and building audiences. We focused on the improvement of Google reviews for CL&L as a high average rating offers both search result benefit and customer confidence.
We’re so proud of the whole team approach to our client CL&L, and of the work we produced in such a short period of time.
At the end of our three-month agreement, we presented seven strategic documents, analyses or recommendations that have since begun to be implemented by the CL&L team. This, in itself, is such a pleasing result of our work with Cafe Lighting and Living.
The CL&L Instagram feed honours the high standard of the products they sell, as well as the strict brand standards we set for the page. Very pleasingly, while the custodians of their socials, we gained a significant increase in following across their social platforms and engagement grew too. Email marketing, while a stalwart of the CL&L marketing strategy, also benefitted with a database increase. Our look book EDM had a record open rate and click through rate.
Finally, we saw the number of Google reviews jump 35% in the time we managed them, and an increase of 10% on their rating.
In all, having Cafe Lighting as a client was such a rewarding experience for the pepper team. It was a wonderful combination of strategy and day-to-day work that enabled us to truly get to the heart of the brand and to understand the retail, ecommerce and trade show customer so well.