Sale Greyhound Club

The Sale Greyhound Club has been a one of the leading providers of entertainment and employment in the Gippsland region since 1936, and is a legendary venue across Gippsland.

The Problem.

Their existing website needed a revamp, as well as updating to be more compatible with mobile devices, but the bulk of this project was a tailored social media training package to make sure that Sale Greyhounds’ social media platforms were working effectively, delivering strong ROI and improving customer relationships.

The business had recently refurbished and rebranded their bistro to “Graze Family Bistro”, with logo and branding design done by ACE. A challenge with this rebrand was to ensure that not only was the new look fun and visually appealing to a younger market, but the colour scheme had to match up with Greyhound Racing Victoria’s existing branding.

The website also needed to showcase events and be capable of making an upcoming event the highlight of the site, as well as being able to quickly and easily deliver up to date racing results.

On top of these areas, greyhound racing in Victoria was going through controversy and issues with both public image and consumer confidence, so it was important to showcase Sale Greyhound Club as a fantastic venue for any event, and the Graze Family Bistro as the place to go for a great meal.

The Solution.

In order to achieve a website design that stood out, was fun and light, and made navigation easy, ACE tracked down a collection of unique pastel colours that would brighten up the design and act as a practical method of identifying each section of the website.

These colours were chosen based on similarity to the classic style of the corporate colours from Greyhound Racing Victoria, while still being unique and giving Sale Greyhound Club their own style.

Utilising an easily manageable website platform, ACE was able to create a website that made it easy for employees to update race information or events. This was a major part of the new website, as it was a challenge to ensure that not only the information on the website was correct for Greyhound Racing Victoria events, but that links out to 3rd party pages for vital information were set up correctly and tied in with Gambling and Alcohol laws.

We also implemented an OpenTable system to the website so that the public could easily book a table at Graze Family Bistro through the website, and that the Sale Greyhound Club staff could easily manage their bookings through the one system.

The focal point of the social media training was to show the Sale Greyhound Club staff how social media platforms can be used as a marketing tool for the business, not just a place to post a picture now and then.

Victorian legislation makes it extremely challenging to promote the gaming venue or racing events without breaching gambling advertising laws, so we needed to work with the staff to find a way to entice people to the venue.

We decided on a strategy of promoting the bistro, the staff members themselves, and the excitement that could be had at the regular entertainment events at the venue.

The biggest benefit from this strategy of social media marketing is that the staff were able to promote the Sale Greyhound Club’s features visually to their audience. This was in contrast to their existing strategy of utilising radio to tell listeners about their events, and meant that when combined they were able to use ‘show and tell’ to appeal to a broader range of people.

The Result.

To say the result was successful is an understatement.

Ever since developing the website, ACE has had great feedback from the public about the style and the function of the Sale Greyhound Club website, which stands out as a great example of how you can refresh a brand, add new features, and still make the website appealing and visually stunning without losing functionality.

As the client was happy for ACE to do what we wanted in terms of design, content and layout, we were able to really push a new look. The client was also quite detailed with the information provided to ACE, which meant we could create a unique, stand out design that met all the expectations of the client in terms of information displayed for visitors while appealing to a much broader audience.

The OpenTable booking system has also been a great success, with bookings through the website exploding since its implementation. Immediately after the new website went live, weekly bookings in Graze Family Bistro went up a massive 650%.

This was in part to the new approach to social media strategy, and the focus on ROI as the most important measure for success. One strategy was to create a “dish of the week” post on social media, promote the dish and monitor the success.

A wildly successful example of this strategy, Graze Family Bistro’s Avocado Chicken with Prawns, went from being a dish so unpopular it was about to be removed from the menu, to being the 2nd highest selling dish on the menu following the social media promotion.

The new strategy also resulted in a whopping half a million page impressions in the month following its implementation, with the biggest success being the promotion of Sale Greyhound Club’s Gold Cup.

In December 2017, the client had spent a significant amount on social media posts to promote the event (with modest results), whereas in December 2018 the strategy was shifted to focus on ROI, resulting in similar impressions and double the engagements off a social media spend one tenth of the previous year.