Bord Bia’s Carol Marks reflects on the runaway success of the popular ‘Easy Steps to Dream Gardens’ campaign.
Working with Bloom award-winning garden designers, Irish plant nurseries, and Irish garden retailers, Easy Steps to Dream Gardens – a new initiative designed to help the public to plant their own show garden at home – was launched to coincide with the Bloom weekend, providing a virtual activity to celebrate and highlight Bloom in its second virtual incarnation.
All award-winning Bloom garden designers were canvassed, resulting in 16 design submissions, shortlisted to 7. The nine designers not shortlisted for this incarnation were given the option to be held in reserve to continue the campaign in the future.
Nursery growers were invited to submit their availability lists across the season for consideration by the designers for inclusion in their plans, while garden centres were canvassed and invited to participate to promote the initiative with point-of-sale in their premises.
This project was developed with support across three internal teams, and multi-specialist external agencies, requiring coordination and liaison across design, web, digital, print, and communications.
A specialist agency was engaged to create a suite of 3-dimensional images and videos for each of the seven gardens. A second agency assisted with developing the downloadable PDFs for each garden design pack, including full details/garden plan/planting plan and plant lists. This element was also utilised to develop a Trade information pack with details of all gardens and a plant list that was sent out to nurseries, as well as to 103 garden centres with their POS.
A dedicated and engaging point of sale was creatively displayed in 103 garden centres nationwide, with Keans Garden Centre in Claremorris winning the best display award.
A full support package was developed for participating garden designers, nurseries, and garden centres, including a suite of social media assets and a suggested content plan, and distributed to all. This achieved excellent engagement from stakeholders across all areas of horticulture – garden designers/nurseries/garden centres – with many sharing and posting the information on their media platforms, thus amplifying the campaign.
A powerful PR and social media campaign ensured incredibly strong engagement with the dream gardens section on the Bloom website since launch, resulting in:
- 66,688 unique visitors to the Dream Gardens website to date.
- 5,908 downloads of the garden plans from the Bloom website.
- 9,672 views of the garden videos
Social Media platforms results:
- Click-throughs (to the Dream Gardens on the Bloom website) – 3,398
- Garden design downloads via social media platforms – 336
Excellent coverage was achieved in national and regional press (both trade and consumer), including two double-page spreads in the Business Post and Sunday Times, The Irish Examiner and the Irish Times Business Pages, the Irish Independent and the main body of the Irish Times, while a large number of national and regional radio interviews also took place.
A second burst of Social Media promotion was carried out from August into early September, resulting in a second burst of activity.
KPIs were exceeded across all aspects of the campaign.
To build on this, Bord Bia is planning to bring Easy Steps to Dream Gardens to the live Bloom event this year, with a full supporting activation across all sectors to bring it to life. Watch out for your Bord Bia weekly update email to keep up to date with progress.
Carol Marks, sector manager for Horticulture at Bord Bia, is a graduate of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin. Carol has a background in business management, publishing, and public relations, she returned to study horticulture as a mature student. She worked in private gardening and gardening publishing before joining Bord Bia 15 years ago. Carol works across the whole of the horticulture supply chain. |
