That’s Limerick City!
Coming home from the USA, I found it hard to find a job in my field. All the rejection letters and ghosting from companies just allowed me to be free when Parker Bond LTD needed a Social Media and Marketing Manager. Parker Bond were two businessmen from Limerick City who owned a few businesses in the area. I created content, managed the social media channels and collected data and analytics for their businesses: The Old Quarter Pub & Cafe, The Old Quarter Townhouse, The Top House Grill & Kitchen and Brooks Bridge Farm Foods..
Content Creation
I was alone in my role as a Social Media & Marketing manager at Parker Bond LTD. That allowed me full creative control over the content created for the social media channels. I created print advertising (newspaper ads, posters, small A6 type ads) as well as digital (advertising on screens in the Pub and Hotel) and social media content such as videos and photo content. All had to portray the location’s brand and “feel” while being engaging and interesting. I worked with staff and management in each business to create their visions as well as my own creative ideas. Between us all, we created content to post on three channels, most days, all year.
I also designed multiple iterations of food and drink menus for both The Old Quarter and The Top House. Each menu took about a month to gather information, design, receive feedback from staff, implement the edits and get the final approval before being sent to print. I created graphics of the menus for all online platforms also so the proper information was online as well as on the tables.
Click through to see some of my Video creations!
Social Media
Creating an online brand and having plenty of content was all well and good but I needed to back it up with my knowledge of social media. I was the person behind the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. In today’s world, that matters. A brand’s reputation can be tarnished in a second from social media mismanagement. I endeavour not to allow that to happen. I kept the “Voice” of the social media posts casual, not too formal that it feels like a robot wrote it and not too relaxed that it feels like anyone wrote it. Some people ignore captions completely but they are very important in the end. I was the person replying to customers online through comments and direct messages. I passed on information to the staff if needed but I did my best to reply with an answer to a customer in a timely fashion.
Scheduling content to be posted at certain times and certain days took time to perfect for each business. Each had their own audiences but I was able to figure it out …just as Meta created “suggested posting times”. This all went into the market research and analytical reports I created from my work with the social media platforms.
Online Brand Awareness
When I arrived at the Old Quarter, It was about to go into a rebrand. The sister company next door to the Old Quarter, the Boutique Hotel, was being incorporated into the Old Quarter during the renovation of the building on Little Ellen Street. As part of the rebuild, a new cocktail bar was created in the pub and an extra 10 rooms were added to the hotel, bringing the rooms up to 41 in total. I designed and developed a new website for the Old Quarter Pub, Cafe & Townhouse in 2019 to show off the new giant development of Limerick City Center. I revamped the Top House’s website also at the time, updating and making the site look more modern. Both businesses had listings on Google, Yelp and Trip Advisor, all of which I managed along with the social media channels. I responded to reviews, answered customers’ queries and updated information to help potential customers find us easily.
Being up to date and carrying the same language and personality through all of these sites was a main priority to me. It increased brand trust from people looking at us online and possibly converted that trust to a sale in-house.
Online Marketing
There was no point in creating content without data behind it to back up the reasoning. I learned a lot about video and social media in Bookstr.Inc so I started out creating more video content for the businesses. I used it to show off the live music that was in the Old Quarter every weekend. This was my longest campaign. Every month I would create A1 and A5 posters of the band line-up for advertising. The same design, I turned into graphics for the TVs and Tills in the business. I also pinned the graphic to all social media pages so it was the first thing customers saw. I made Google and Facebook events so anyone looking for an event in Limerick city would see it and maybe attend.
Another long-running, multi-media campaign I did was for the Cocktail of the Month. The head bartender would create a special cocktail each month that complimented the time of year, a product we were trying to show off or that they had on their mind. I created A5 posters, online graphics, advertising for the screens as well as a video of them making the cocktail. The video content was very effective on Instagram, gaining several hundred to thousand views per video. The staff reported back on the amounts of said cocktail sold on the busy days, showing me that it translated to sales.
We used Meta Ads to promote a Bubbly Brunch we were hosting on weekends. Over 4 weeks, 40,000 people in the Limerick area saw our ad and the launch of the brunch was a major success.
At the end of every week, I created an analytics report for management and myself. Management would have been confused by Meta’s ever-changing business manager so I created my own for them to read easily. Each week I noted how each post did and from that I could see what kind of content did well on our pages and which kind of content didn’t work at all. As months went by, I formed a strong knowledge of what the Old Quarter needed and what the Top House needed because their audiences were not the same at all.
Megan Dalton Rafferty 