The Creative Engine Behind Landsec’s Social Transformation
The Winner: The Content Emporium
Award: Best Content Team, 2025: Silver
“A really impressive entry, showing great teamwork and real innovation in the sector - Really incredible stats across the board - can’t be easy when looking at the amount of channels.”
Team Summary
Landsec is the UK’s largest commercial property development and investment company. Their portfolio includes some of the country’s most iconic and largest shopping centres and retail outlets, from Bluewater in Kent and StDavid’s in Cardiff to Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow. At The Content Emporium, we manage the full digital sphere of each of the 17 centres. From Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, to websites and email newsletters, our team is behind the scenes crafting it all.
At the heart of Landsec’s organic social success is our incredible social media team: 39 energetic, enthusiastic, and endlessly creative storytellers located around the UK. From Bristol to Reading, London to Cardiff, Leeds to Glasgow, this team operates as a nationwide network of talent, bringing a consistent, yet locally relevant voice, to every one of Landsec’s shopping centres.
What makes this team stand out is its ability to work across the full spectrum of social media content, crafting compelling stories which are nuanced for each channel yet remain true to brand and the local community they operate within. Crucially, the social team connects to the rest of our content team, ensuring campaign messaging and tone of voice is consistent across web content and email marketing too.
You’re wondering who’s in the team? From the Director of Social and Account Director for Landsec, through strategic and creative brains leading on ideation, designers, content editors on copywriting and scheduling and a skilled bank of content creators, videographers and video editors, we have excellence at every level.
The team works as a well-oiled machine, planning and creating unique content across 59 social profiles, ensuring every piece of content feels consistent in quality, yet nuanced and tailored to each individual community.
Beyond versatility, we also bring depth. Within the team, we have specialist photographers and videographers who give key campaigns a cinematic polish, elevating everyday moments into shareable stories that capture attention in those critical first three seconds.
And once the content has been posted, that’s far from the end of the journey. Our community managers are always watching and listening, jumping on all the opportunities to drive proactive engagement and ensuring all DM and @mentions are handled. Moments of ‘crisis’ are minimised with cool-headed responses and escalation processes. Finally, our client success specialists analyse channel performance and share it out with the wider team, allowing us to iterate each month - getting better and better.
Brief
This is a client we have retained and grown for the past 16 years, but in 2024, Landsec challenged us to reimagine their social media presence as community-first platforms.
The key objectives they wanted to achieve were:
Deliver consistent, platform-native content across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X
Reflect each centre’s distinct personality, tone of voice, and community culture
Keep pace with trends and platform shifts, without compromising quality
Build a genuine sense of community and locality for each centre
Operate at scale: 8 cities, 17 centres, 59 social profiles, 365 days a year
To meet this brief, we knew we needed more than a solid strategy, we needed a brilliant team of planners, strategists, content creators, copywriters and community managers with the skills to build, maintain and continually feed a thriving, hungry community. And that’s exactly what we built; a cross-functional, high-performing team of endlessly enthusiastic creatives who really do, do it all.
Solution
To begin Landsec’s organic social transformation, we made our content creators the beating heart of the plan for each channel. We knew that we needed engaging people in the content if it was to be a success. We made sure we were ready and able to capture every new store opening, the latest product drops, cultural events and talk to real shopping centre guests about their experiences.
On TikTok, our content team dialled up the big cultural moments and events. They:
Live-streamed the first Student Shopper events at St David’s, Trinity Leeds and Gunwharf Quays
Camped out overnight to capture every moment of Sephora’s landmark Bluewater launch
Tapped into cultural moments, from the Six Nations to the return of Oasis
Surprised shoppers by delivering on-the-ground joy, such as £500 spending sprees at major brands like John Lewis
But our strategy went beyond one-off moments and milestones. We developed a sustained content plan that positioned centres as experience-first destinations with a friendly human face. We sought out the personalities who were already working in the centres and unearthed their hidden talents, we found the humour and heart that already existed in each centre, and gave it a platform to thrive.
On Instagram, we:
Jumped on trends to showcase retailer culture in fun, engaging ways
Brought to life content at experience spaces like the Monster inflatable obstacle course
Regular content visit shoots ensured a regular drumbeat of stories, from breaking news and new store teasers to event coverage shared in real-time, encouraging footfall and allowing followers to become part of the spectacle by interacting online.
Authenticity was core to our direction. We retained real, unscripted moments that audiences could relate to, creating a feed that felt spontaneous, light-touch and – in a world of generic AI filler – undeniably human. We built teams of local content creators in Kent, Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow, who knew our centres and the surrounding community, and could identify local trends (and had the accents to match). Above all, we had fun creating our content, so our audiences had fun too.
Results
Our approach allowed us to remain hyper-local and audience-led, while achieving consistency and strategic alignment across the national Landsec portfolio.
The scale was enormous, so we grew to match:
Our content creation team increased from three people to over 20 in a year
The whole social team increased from 20 to 39 people
We delivered over 386 content shoots between August 2024 and July 2025, across 17 shopping centres
We created a whopping 9,208 posts across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok
We also proved that people-first content doesn’t just connect with audiences, it converts into tangible metrics too.
Follower growth: Every centre experienced sustained growth in followers over the year, with particularly strong momentum across both TikTok and Instagram.
Reach/Views: Content delivered significant visibility across platforms, generating substantial TikTok views and a marked increase in organic reach on Meta.
Engagement: Engagement levels rose considerably YoY across both Meta and TikTok, reflecting stronger audience connection and interaction.
Top Performing Content:
A John Lewis shopping spree TikTok video surpassed 340k organic views
A Sephora launch video generated over 14.4k engagements
The Oasis merch shop giveaway received a reach of over 130k, and over 6k engagements
Driving real-world impact: Our content didn’t just perform well online, it delivered offline, too. Organic hype around store openings, including Space NK, Sephora and Zara, contributed to queueing crowds and press attention.
Footfall & sales: Social media performance directly correlated with business outcomes, contributing to measurable increases in both sales and footfall across the Landsec Retail Portfolio.
Client trust and retention: Landsec’s ongoing investment in the work of our social team is a reflection on the results we have achieved. In our new contract negotiations in April 2025, the number of content visits increased by 9% and so far this past year (from August 2024-July 2025), The Content Emporium have completed 386 centre visits at the Landsec Shopping Centres.
“The social content team at The Content Emporium work incredibly hard, from the team overseeing the strategy to those visiting our places across the UK, but as a client, they make it seem so effortless. They're always on the hunt for the next piece of high-performing content, and take all our client feedback in their stride, we see other social accounts in our industry clearly taking inspiration from what the team have delivered, but that in itself is a statement for how well they deliver.”
- Lottie Finch - Digital Marketing Manager - Landsec Outlets