Brief
With over 120 restaurants in 17 countries and the wagamama lounge, which can be found at some of the UK’s top music festivals, wagamama offers a new kind of dining experience: fresh Japanese-inspired food in a friendly, contemporary setting.
Although big in personality, wagamama’s online presence lacked synergy with their retail service-space. wagamama wanted to take the vibrancy and inclusivity of the brand and create an online presence that reflected their status as an award-winning CoolBrand, whilst educating consumers about their unique offering and inspiring customers to try new dishes.
Strategy
As wagamama’s global digital marketing agency, our digital strategy was to increase brand awareness at both a global and local level; engaging, exciting and educating customers all over the world. With the aim of creating global consistency for the main UK and international territories that are expanding through wagamama’s International Franchise programmes, we worked to create an online presence that focused on the innovative personality of the brand.
Execution
Working in close partnership with wagamama, we took the initial web brief and transformed it into an online experience across all digital channels. Taking into consideration SEO, social media integration and scalability, we devised a strategy that would position wagamama as an industry leader, bringing the brand to life online.
The interactive digital menu consolidates the wagamama brand for existing customers whilst enticing newcomers to the restaurant, enabling noodle fans to filter through dishes with ease and speed. As one of the first restaurant chains to sign up to the EU and UK nutritional display guidelines, visitors can now check the nutritional value of their dishes, enhancing the control of the customer.
Built on award-winning content management system, Sitecore, the new website utilises the latest technologies in design and development, from parallax scrolling to responsive design, for a multi-device age. Designed to provide an intuitive user experience through a targeted content strategy, wagamama fans are now able to explore new dishes, order take-out and even check the nutritional value of each dish, all within the accessible, innovatively designed website.
By utilising the integrated Digital Marketing Suite, wagamama will be able to track engagement analytics and the digital footprints of their visitors, whilst offering wagamama customers a unique and stimulating digital experience.
Results
Our SEO team’s main objective was to increase awareness of wagamama outside the brand name. Just one day after launch, rankings for localised ‘Japanese restaurant’ terms improved by 183 per cent on average, whilst rankings for the food dishes offered by wagamama improved by 142 per cent on average.
Pre-launch, just 4 of wagamama’s “Japanese restaurant” terms were appearing on the first page of Google; the brand now has 38 terms appearing on the first page, an increase of 850 per cent.The first week of October saw 25 per cent more people visit the website from natural search, compared to the first week of September.
In terms of wagamama’s ability to compete in the food retail industry, the new website is particularly innovative and industry-leading. In order to produce such a forward-thinking, engaging website, we researched the competitor landscape in detail, focusing on how accessible and navigable the competitor sites were. The wagamama website stands out from the crowd, setting the sector precedent; every touch-point has been considered, from the booking process to bounce rates.
Engagement analytics and campaign tracking will be monitored in order to track, analyse and continually improve the performance of the wagamama website.