June 2022

Malahide Castle & Gardens

First up, we have our lovely clients Malahide Castle & Garden. We entered our work for this client into the Facebook for a Business/Brand category. We felt that they were suitable for this award as they primarily use their Facebook page to communicate and engage with their audience. Their content showcases their various events and amenities, all with a family-friendly touch. Paid social is then used to amplify their messages, increase brand awareness, and most importantly drive ticket sales. Custom audiences are a fundamental part of their paid ad’s strategy, so the digital team at Hopkins Communications build a series of time-based engagement audiences along with lookalike audiences of same. Depending on the campaign goals, these audiences are either included to re-target or excluded to strengthen future retargeting.    

To see more content from Malahide Castle & Gardens be sure to follow their Facebook page here. 

Cork Education & Training Board

We couldn’t put ourselves forward for a digital award with acknowledging our wonderful, long-standing client Cork Education and Training Board (Cork ETB). We made the decision to put Cork ETB forward in the Instagram for a Business, Brand or Organisation category. The idea behind the consistent posting on the Cork ETB Instagram is to enhance brand awareness and brand recall, while simultaneously ensuring that the many schools, campuses, training centres and other education services all have their voices heard. By ensuring that all of the content posted on the Cork ETB channel is engaging and relevant, we keep content relevant and engaging by using a combination of infographics, video and static content. Doing this answers the key question we ask all our clients when it comes to organic posting… why are you posting this content? If the answer is just because, then you need to rethink your strategy! 

In addition to organic social media content, we will also often incorporate paid social media elements to the strategy in order to ensure that we’re targeting the right people with the right message. The majority of our campaigns are local, targeting the Cork area and then we make sure to have separate ad groups on both Instagram and Facebook depending on the audience we’re reaching out to. For example, when targeting students, we allocate the majority of our budget behind Instagram placement.  

To see more Cork ETB content you can follow their Instagram page here.

University of Limerick – Immersive Software Engineering

When it came to the Multi-Platform Campaign category, we wanted to highlight the work that we did with a newer client of ours, the brand-new, John and Patrick Collison of Stripe endorsed, Immersive Software Engineering course at University of Limerick (UL). As this is a new course the initial objective was to create brand awareness and educate people about the course offering, as a result creating interest in the course with the target age demographics of 16 – 19 years of age with an interest in software development, IT and more, as well as with their parents, in the run up to initial CAO applications.

The second objective of this campaign was to drive course applications on the CAO while it was open. In order to continue to keep the course and its offerings in the forefront of students and their parents’ minds during the CAO application process. The creative for all the posts in this campaign were videos as they felt more engaging for our target audience, while also giving us the option to re-target video viewers at later stages in the campaign. This campaign took place over the course of a number of months and across multiple platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.   

The biggest win by far for this campaign was by far the increased amount of traffic to the Immersive Software Engineering website over the course of the campaign, which served as a huge indicator of success for the campaign, as the CAO application data is not available to us, we cannot see how many applications occurred yet, but we can take these website visits as an expression of interest in the course which was one of the overarching objectives of the campaign since the outset.

Personalise Me

PersonaliseMe.ie was the client that stood out most to us when thinking about what client we could put forward in the Social Media Driving eCommerce category. Personalise Me offers personalised gifts for babies and children under 12 years of age for any and all occasion from birthdays to christenings and first holy communions to first days of school. With everything from personalised bibs and baby grows to Christmas stocking and Late, Late Toy Show PJs and everything in between Personalise Me strives to be a one stop shop for beautiful, personalised gifts to make any occasion even more special. As a result, their social presence is hugely important for them as it keeps their loyal customers up to date on their latest offerings while also engaging new customers to place an order.  

We used a combination of paid and organic social content on both Facebook and Instagram as part of our social media strategy for Personalise Me. With the organic content we keep it up to date with our latest products and offers for the relevant season, e.g., Christmas, Halloween, Communion season, etc in order to keep all our loyal customers up to date with the business. We combined this organic social presence with paid social campaigns in order to attract new customers who have never engaged with the business before.  

HC Instagram & Sparks

Our very own Hopkins Communications Instagram and Sparks blogs were also nominated in this year’s Sockies and contributed to us being awarded with Best Small Digital Agency.  

We use the Hopkins Communications Instagram to showcase our rich and varied experience through our work across all our departments including Public Relations, Advertising, Promotions, Event Management, Graphic Design, Web Design and Digital Marketing. We also use our Instagram to promote our clients as they launch new campaigns and to help spread the word and create awareness for them. We also find that Instagram is a great place to highlight results and client campaigns that we are proud of.  

In October 2020 we decided that our Instagram needed a little bit of a facelift and so our digital team collaborated with our design team to give our Instagram profile a brand-new look and feel! We came up with the idea of having a new coloured background every month and a themed page breaker at the start of each month, themed around the month ahead. The result was a beautiful colour gradient, so if you go and scroll through our Instagram profile you can see the most amazing rainbow of colours that really is so gorgeous to look at! 

Of course, we can’t talk about our social media presence without mentioning this very blog that you are reading, SPARKS!! Our monthly digital round up, offering you the latest and greatest digital news from the last month all in one place!

Do you need help with your digital strategy or have a specific topic you want us to cover?