Poplar Nurseries

Poplar Nurseries is a leading independent garden centre based just outside Colchester, renowned for its wide range of plants and exceptional customer service. Poplar’s offering is extensive from a restaurant and plant nursery to farm shop and play area.

COVID-19

The lockdown meant that all retail establishments had to shut their operations, which left Poplar with no ability to bring in revenue from sales, booked events or the in-demand restaurant. Poplar had never looked to online sales or arranged deliveries before, but the garden centre required the ability to bring in this much needed revenue during this time.

Poplar Delivers

For speed and agility, KAT team suggested creating a breakaway online sales brand, called Poplar Delivers, to enable the garden centre to sell plants, garden essentials, garden furniture and fresh food from its farm shop during lockdown. The new website was designed, built, filled with stock and set live taking orders within a week.

Our digital team then designed a range of adverts to promote the new delivery website to Poplar’s large organic base and a paid-for campaign to drive awareness, traffic and conversions. These campaigns saw instant returns on the new website and allowed Poplar to offload stock that would have otherwise perished and bring in a vital revenue stream during a tough time for all retail establishments.

New website

KAT have since built a larger purpose-built website for Poplar bring their offering in line with their digital transformation and future e-commerce plans (as below). KAT took on the challenge of building a new website for Poplar, one focused on SEO that would have the set up and ability to be fully e-commerce – once internal processes allowed this to be ready to be logistically moved forward.

User interaction

The team created a huge mega-nav for the site, detailing every one of the client's goods and services from gardening to the children’s playground. This not only helped to increase user interaction, giving viewers more reason to stay on the site longer learning about the centre, but the extra content helped to increase rankings for SEO.

We also incorporated a programme of link building with other, more visited sites of businesses Poplar have partnered or worked with, to give them more domain authority and improve SEO.

As well as organically driving traffic to the new website using SEO tactics and social posts, we manage Pay-Per-Click adverts for the centre along with social ad campaigns in order to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to the site.

Creative continuity

Poplar's branding already existed; we aimed to establish better continuity from store to across online content. From e-shots, to website banners and social graphics, wide text and guidelines were set for internal teams too.

Promotional planning

Each section of the company drew its own focus and needed its own promotional planning and spotlight online. Imagery and and videography processes were put in place, in order for regular on-site clips to be provided by the team, alongside setting seasonal timed official professional shoots.