Cutting pollution and easing traffic congestion is a major issue for every urban centre across the globe. One practical solution that is being pioneered in Southampton is a centralised distribution centre on the outskirts of the city centre.
The Sustainable Distribution Centre (SDC) is a partnership between Meachers Global Logistics and Southampton City Council. The SDC’s aim is to consolidate the deliveries and reduce the level of commercial traffic going into the city centre.
The partnership commissioned Carswell Gould to:
Our solution was to create a campaign which used integrated marketing communications to ensure that a compelling message about the SDC reached the target audience through as many touchpoints as possible.
This started by creating and simplifying the key messages and powerful campaign visual elements to express the benefits of the SDC, both to the city’s environment and to the prospective customer themselves.
We used a combination of the following to reach our audience:
This combination of activity ensured that the audience had a number of opportunities to see our messages about the SDC and to get in contact with Meachers to find out more.
The initial press release on the SDC reached over a quarter of a million people and was covered in both regional and trade media.
The social media campaign is ongoing and continues to gain momentum with a high number of engagements for posts on the subject.
Although the use of the exhibition materials was limited by the outbreak of COVID-19, we have been able to work with the partnership to develop an exhibition video which was played to over 100 delegates at the Council’s Green City Charter event in July 2020.
Emails on the SDC have been sent to circa 2,000 recipients with a click-through rate of over 23% (average click-through rate is 2.5%).
The work the team at Carswell Gould has done to promote the SDC has moved the communications for the project up to a higher level. Carswell Gould has used its marketing expertise to ensure the benefits of the scheme are clearly articulated and reach prospective customers. We’re seeing demand for our Southampton warehousing increase and I’m sure the communications work for the SDC is having the desired impact.
