Leicester Restaurant Week

Tasty deals on a plate

Arch Creative partnered with Cool As Leicester and FU Media to deliver the highly-successful joined-up campaign for Leicester Restaurant Week, funded by BID Leicester. Leicester Restaurant Week brings together the best restaurants in Leicester for a week’s celebration of all the amazing cuisines, dishes and dining experiences the city has to offer.

The Leicester Restaurant Week campaign demonstrates the ability of our three businesses to work together seamlessly on projects that require extensive business liaison and content creation alongside a consumer facing brand, PR and advertising campaign. We were able to allocate work to the strengths of the project team whilst keeping a central point of contact for the client, moving from kick-off meeting to full event delivery in just 10 weeks.

From branding, through to launch PR, social media engagement and advertising, we have proven results working in partnership to deliver a campaign of the highest standard.

Creative Concept

As the inaugural Restaurant Week in the city, we needed to get as many customers excited and encouraged to come and try what Leicester has to offer, so created a strong brand for this event to set it up for many years of success.

We kept it simple, with the main headline as: Leicester Restaurant Week. Not only was this a proven method based on our research with similar events in other cities, it also made the new event quick and easy to understand for our target audiences. Graphic imagery of cutlery alongside quirky straplines and copy complemented with a bold colour palette brought life and personality to this campaign. Overall, the branding strategy helped to:

  • Maximise the impact of this first-time event
  • Engage the audiences quickly
  • Engage restaurants and encourage them to take part
  • Emphasise the breadth and depth of the restaurant offer in Leicester

Our Strategy

The campaign had two distinct phases – firstly, to recruit businesses to the scheme and, secondly, a consumer promotional campaign to raise awareness and encourage participation. The public and press engagement included all of the following:

  • We created the Leicester Restaurant Week brand and a website where all offers could be hosted and consumers could download vouchers to participate in the scheme
  • Set up, managed and created regular engaging and branded content for the Leicester Restaurant Week social channels and mailing list.
  • Campaign videos were created, showcasing the variety of venues and offers available during Leicester Restaurant Week and enticing the audience through high-quality food imagery in venues. These were distributed via social media.
  • A paid social media campaign was run with bespoke creative to deliver campaign messaging in three stages – creating awareness of the event, encouraging click through to the website to view the range of offers, and encouraging participation when the scheme was live.
  • Marketing materials including posters, window vinyls, A6 cards to hand out and strut cards were created and distributed throughout the city
  • An Out Of Home campaign ran through BT InLink sites in the city centre
  • All content was shared across our owned media platforms, Cool As Leicester and Dluxe Leicestershire

Campaign Results

Business engagement

  • 24 businesses represented at Business briefing event
  • 46 offers from 30 different businesses available

Website & Social Campaign

  • 22k total website views
  • 2,634 voucher downloads
  • 26.3K link clicks
  • 162.8K reach

Leicester Restaurant Week social channels gains

  • 2,600+ followers with a 249,300 reach and 51,500 engagements
  • Over 2,100 mailing list subscribers – a ready made audience for the event to market to in year 2

PR, Media & Influencer Outreach

  • The Leicester Restaurant Week campaign was seen by over 22 million people and created a PR value of almost £1million
  • 16 media and influencers were placed at 22 venues – posts shared from this outreach reached over 500,000 people with almost 10,000 engagements

Customer Feedback

  • A sample of 100 participants rated their Leicester Restaurant Week experience an average of 4/5
  • 86% of participants heard about the event from either the Leicester Restaurant Week social media channels or from press/influencers
  • 89% of respondents would want to see Leicester Restaurant Week return

In just 10 weeks from kick-off to delivery, our partnership delivered a comprehensive and joined-up campaign, weaving B2B and B2C elements together seamlessly to leave Leicester Restaurant Week in a strong position to move into year 2.