CASE STUDY: ALL ABOARD
CONTENT MARKETING AT HORNBY
Hornby is an iconic British brand, manufacturing model trains since 1901 with a large following of passionate model rail fans worldwide. However in recent years the brand had become less and less communicative with its customer base, with the majority of communication via an irregular sales email blast featuring a list of newly available models, resulting in the development of a secretive and even arrogant reputation amongst modellers.
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A Content Marketing strategy was devised and implemented, as part of a complete redevelopment of the online and eCommerce function of the company, to open up the fascinating world of Hornby and reconnect with its customers using blogs, website functional content, B2C email, social media, events, B2B communication and customer magazines.
Social Media
Events
Product
content
Website content
B2B comms
Blog
content
B2C
email
Brand forums
Customer magazines
Where to start?
The first step in any Content Marketing strategy is to identify sources of content that will be of interest to your audience, and it quickly became apparent that Hornby had a previously untapped wealth of fascinating content - its own product development department. The procedure of designing and manufacturing a scale model engine is a painstaking process, taking up to three years from idea to product launch, performed by a team of designers, engineers and researchers who are passionate and highly knowledgeable about railways and model rail.
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Hence, after setting up strict working practices to ensure that commercially sensitive information was not released prematurely, the doors were thrown open on the previously top secret Hornby Development Department in the form of a fortnightly blog embedded in the Hornby eCommerce site - The Engine Shed.
The Engine Shed
From its first issue The Engine Shed quickly became established as THE source of insider information at Hornby, attracting up to 30,000 views per issue and stimulating discussion on the Hornby Forum, in addition to external model rail forums (on which, it's fair to say, Hornby had previously been receiving a large volume of vociferously negative comments). The Engine Shed actively encouraged feedback on the models in development that it featured, allowing consumers to have a say in the progression of designs as they passed along the development timeline.
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It would be overkill to claim that The Engine Shed was solely responsible for turning around Hornby's reputation amongst the model rail community, but it certainly had a dramatic effect in a short space of time, even being nominated for an award by the aforementioned external forum.
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It's important to remember that once a blog schedule is established then you need to deliver regularly - on the rare occasion that The Engine Shed didn't appear by 12pm every second Friday, we would get messages on Facebook asking where it was!
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Get your orders in early
Whilst The Engine Shed was never intended to be an overt sales platform, one area in which it became inherently linked to sales was the reveal of 'newly tooled' models - i.e. models produced from a newly developed mould for the first time - a big draw for keen rail modellers.
Functionality had been developed on the website to allow the 'pre-ordering' of items before they were physically on sale. When a pre-release model was debuted on The Engine Shed it would often be simultaneously launched as a pre-order item on the website, in many cases selling out before the model's physical arrival.
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To further amplify The Engine Shed content, a link would appear on the item's product listing driving visitors back to The Engine Shed area. Video or imagery produced for The Engine Shed would be added to the eCommerce product listing.
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Keeping it social
Social Media is an integral part of any Content Marketing strategy - Social will always have its own distinct strategy (for example supporting key sales objectives, providing a constant customer conversation etc) but it also has an integral relationship with Content Marketing. This two-way relationship was made easier at Hornby as The Engine Shed was compiled by our multi-skilled Social Media Exec. The publication of The Engine Shed was teased on our social channels before publication, posted simultaneously when the blog was pushed live on the website, and re-posted the week following publication.
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However the central compilation of the blog then gave us a huge bank of imagery and (most importantly for Social) video material that could be re-purposed in the run-up to a model's release. Social also provided a key route for feedback on the blog - as previously mentioned this feedback would sometimes actually influence the development of a particular model.
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Make an event of it
Any marketer will be painfully aware of the eye-watering costs of participating in events and exhibitions, when only 100s or 1000s of consumers will benefit from the valuable face-to-face interaction with your brand.
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So, how do you maximise the ROI from your event activity? By creating a Content Marketing event page, opening up your event activity to the 1000s of your consumers that can't attend your event.
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When Hornby attended Model Rail Scotland at Glasgow SECC, we devised a Content Marketing plan to maximise the exposure, with The Engine Shed published and updated live from the exhibition, focusing on everything happening at the show (not just Hornby) with the blog displayed live on the stand, and a Social Media and B2C email campaign directing consumers to the blog over the event weekend.
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The result? Over 10 times as many people experiencing the event activity. See what we did here.
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Content and website development
We've concentrated so far on the role of a central blog in Hornby's Content Marketing, and how this can be fed into other comms channels, but another important route for Content Marketing is the integration of material within the eCommerce platform.
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This can be as simple as expanding a basic product description into a fuller, more informative and interactive product page; buying guides and 'how to' material; magazine pages with routes to buy; embedded surveys and infographics. All of these content pieces can then be fed into social and email channels as before, providing valuable opportunities to communicate without an overt sales message.
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These content pieces were built at Hornby using the Bluefoot CMS platform (created by our incredible development agency Gene Commerce) within a Magento Enterprise website, but other plug-in content creation systems are available depending on the web platform you are using, and the complexity of design that you require.
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The next level of website content creation is the development of bespoke content features for your site. One such development at Hornby was our Customer Images feature, allowing consumers to post pictures of their Hornby models in situ on their own layouts, which would then appear in a gallery embedded in the model's product listing and in a central Customer Images gallery.
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This feature was hugely successful, resulting in 1000s of submissions from consumers and providing a rich source of UGC (user generated content) that could then be fed into the Content Marketing mix - most notably on Social Media channels where Customer Image posts attracted some of the highest levels of engagement of all posts.
Content Marketing in the mix
The above is just a taste of Content Marketing in action at Hornby, other areas that we haven't even examined include:
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integration of Content Marketing with B2C email campaigns
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re-purposing of content for use in customer magazines
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use of bespoke content to support key sales objectives
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bringing products to life with video
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pushing content into B2B communications
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The key objective of any Content Marketing plan should be to make your content work as hard as possible, through as many channels as possible, in order to maximise the impact and ROI from your investment.
Results
It's never easy to provide an exact ROI on marketing activity (although it's easy to blind your audience with stats), but the following will give you an idea of the influence seen from Hornby's activity:
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up to 30,000 views per blog post (over 1,000,000 in one year across the Hornby Hobbies estate)
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average time on page over 2.5 minutes
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high levels of pre-order sales initiated from content activity
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major positive change in brand sentiment on Hornby and external forums
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increased engagement with social posts
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increased engagement with B2C email containing brand content
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1000s of UGC consumer submissions
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instilling collaborative working within Hornby
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Conclusion
Hopefully I've inspired you to give Content Marketing a try for your own business. CM will never be a replacement for more traditional forms of advertising, but in today's evermore crowded media landscape it is a vitally important method of communication to include in your marketing mix (and your marketing/media budget).
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If there is one key learning from running a Content Marketing campaign at Hornby it is communication. Larger brands can have a tendency to compartmentalise different business functions, especially digital/eCommerce versus brand marketing, whereas a successful CM campaign relies on structured collaboration between online, marketing, product development, design and sales, with every department buying in to the concept.
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It's also beneficial for anyone managing a Content Marketing campaign to have a thorough understanding of both brand marketing AND digital marketing - I have a background in marketing comms but now work in digital, so although Content Marketing was based in the Online Department at Hornby, activity supported brand marketing goals.
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Finally, none of the above would be possible without a talented and hardworking content team, which I was lucky enough to manage at Hornby. It should be remembered that in addition to the Hornby activity, we were also simultaneously running campaigns for Hornby Hobbies' other brands Airfix, Scalextric and Corgi - no mean feat!
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If you'd like to put together a Content Marketing campaign but don't know where to start, please contact me via www.mattwatson.info and who knows what might happen...
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Matt
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© 2019 by Matt Watson. All content from Hornby © Hornby Hobbies Limited