Covid Campaign – Easter Joy for Orestone Wealth Management
In early April 2020, in the midst of the Coronavirus outbreak, a financial planning client, Orestone Wealth Management, approached me for marketing inspiration. Orestone wanted to send their 100 VIP clients a small, unexpected gift in the post. They understood the need to connect with their audience during lockdown and knew that loneliness is one of the number one epidemics in the country. The client brief was to nurture their existing clients by sending “something like a jigsaw” out in the post.
In marketing and PR, we all want to create campaign content that’s fun and interesting, but it is very important to stay authentic to your brand and message and this can end up in a compromise situation. Orestone were open to ideas and the small but valuable opportunity to enhance people’s lives and make them happier.
As a marketing consultant- it was great to have a wide brief and freedom in my research. I was looking to find the sweet spot of providing a genuine emotional connection with this small but meaningful campaign. I also wanted to capture a more positive mood of lockdown.
I’m fortunate that I’ve worked from home for the last 15 years and so I was comfortably operating business as usual when lockdown began. After some challenging research, I proposed something a bit risky for the Orestone brand but highly relevant to the times – a chocolate Easter egg toilet roll. This was timely, relevant, seasonal, light-hearted and fun to spread a little joy at such a bad time. I trusted my intuition that this fresh, unexpected, surprise gift which would catch people’s attention and persuaded the client to run with it.
The chocolate gift would be sent with a custom designed card with a clear message and narrative – that Orestone is still open for business and still cares. I really hoped that it would reach the audience at the heart level as well as delivering impact in time for Easter and on budget.
Bringing the idea to life was a big challenge due to supplier availability. I quickly found that many business suppliers were no-longer taking on any clients, some not taking on any NEW clients and some were trying hard to maintain business as usual. Having operated my business for 10 years, I’m proud to have a well-established preferred supplier list of local, independent businesses. Buying local and supporting local businesses has always been a core value of my business, but I still found availability difficult.
Looking to buy from a local, independent business, I discovered the lovely father-daughter family business, Choc on choc, based in Bath, Somerset. They patented the idea of layering chocolate on top of chocolate, creating beautiful and unique designs. As they also offer direct retail mailorder, they were also able to mailout directly to clients – which was the perfect supply solution for this campaign.
I soon set about designing some mock up card design options working with the Orestone brand. I then worked with a trusted local graphic designer – Jess Cook Design, Plymouth who was able to produce same-day print ready artwork. I’ve now worked with Jess for a few years sharing many clients, and have found that working with a trusted strategic partner on my wavelength enables me to deliver work to clients very quickly – as if it were in-house. This can be very powerful, offering optimal ROI for clients who wish to have a change from working with an agency.
I was also pleased that local printers – TQ Print & Design, Totnes were able to confirm the booking of the print production of 100 A6 Easter greeting cards to post directly to Choc on Choc. Like many other print suppliers during Coronavirus lock down, they are working with other small businesses to fulfil joint jobs and keep ticking over. Again, I’ve worked with Adrian for over a year over different clients and his attention to detail and willingness to support, help and trouble-shoot if necessary, is brilliant. He arranged for the final cards to be sent to Choc on Choc directly for collation and mailing in packs. This worked a treat.
The chocolate gift packs were received in the week prior to Easter with smiles, thank-you’s and many lovely behind-the-scenes moments. My client was delighted and we are hoping that this will become one of many positive “remember when…” moments from the lockdown times.
I’m taking away the following learning points from this campaign that I’d like to share:
- Connect with your audience – consider genuine emotive connection
- Master relevance – look for timeliness, seasonality and content that’s trending
- Be authentic – stay authentic to your brand and message, don’t have a hidden agenda
- Be brave – play into the unexpected
- Collaborate with strategic partners – buy local – support local – share-for-share
- Good news travels well – people love a good news story and want to share it!
Are there any tips that you’d like to share? Have you had experience of a Covid Campaign? Marketing/ PR experts, have you done anything differently in response to the coronavirus outbreak? It would be great to get your views. Thanks for reading, Ange
About: Orestone Wealth Management is a boutique firm with the head office in Torquay offering financial planning and straight forward, easy-to-understand advice for all financial needs. Founded in 2017, Orestone Wealth is the sister company of Howard Mortgages which has been providing mortgage-related advice for the past 18 years across the South West region. Orestone Wealth Management is a Partner Practice of the FTSE 100 company, St James’s Place Wealth Management. Authentic family values are at the heart of Orestone Wealth, because the Directors are family. They are heavily involved in the communities where their offices are based, find out more here.