Elements of a Successful Grand Opening at Fifth + Broadway
Case Study
Fifth + Broadway is Nashville’s newest shopping destination and restaurant heaven for locals and tourists alike. The 6.2-acre development is home to 30+ retail and dining spaces, the National Museum of African American Music, Justin Timberlake’s newest venture, the tallest residential tower in Nashville and the new headquarters of AllianceBernstein. Fifth + B sits on the corner of Rep. John Lewis Way (formerly 5th Avenue) and Broadway, across the street from the Nashville Predators’ home stadium, Bridgestone Arena, and the Ryman Auditorium.
Throughout several years, more than 7,000 people had a hand in creating this incredible development- including the Parachute Media team, and we are beyond grateful and honored to be a part of Nashville history.
On March 4th, 2021, the hard work of these 7,000 people came to fruition when Fifth + Broadway opened its doors to the public. As Fifth + Broadway’s social media agency, there was a lot of hard work that went on behind the scenes to make the grand opening successful digitally and physically. Below, we’ll break down all the things that went into a successful grand opening and how we made 5+B show up in the feeds of 1 million users in one week.
Organic and Paid Social Media
We began working with Fifth + Broadway back in March 2020. For the first year, we focused our attention on growing their following and reach. Through showing up organically in social feeds with consistent content and branding, community management and engagement every single day, and implementing a detailed ad strategy, we were able to secure 8,681 Facebook Fans and 5,130 Instagram Followers by the end of 2020, a growth rate of 216.6% leading up the grand opening in March 2021.
In just one week, 5+B’s social channels garnered over 1 million impressions, more than 6,000 total engagements and gained nearly 8,000 new followers, and by the end of the month, we reached 20,000 Instagram followers.
As for the ad strategy leading up to the grand opening, there are few tactics of note that you can implement in your brand’s strategy:
- Run Like ads & Profile View ads on Facebook and Instagram
- Keep an eye out for organically successful posts, and put an ad budget behind these to increase engagement and reach
- Utilize engaging creative like videos and bright imagery to run Reach ads to increase brand awareness
- Boost events & branded content from influencers
Influencer Marketing & Tours
Before Fifth + Broadway was open for business, we cultivated a group of local influencers who helped support 5+B’s brand awareness on social media. For a year, influencers like @nashvilletash, @stellllaaa, @jamariaoliviaj, and many others created content at local tenant’s businesses that already had a location in Nashville. Of course, these influencers were on our list of invites for the grand opening.
As a part of the grand opening, Fifth + Broadway’s internal and external agencies hosted VIP tours of 5+B on the very first day of business for key stakeholders and media. The Parachute team planned and led several tours for local influencers. We gave hour-long tours covering almost every single store and eatery at Fifth + Broadway. Overall, the influencers’ content from the tours brought in over 502,000 impressions on social media and lots of great content!
Tenant Support
With 30+ tenants opening in one day at 5+B, there was a lot of ground to cover on social media. A few months before the big day, we led multiple brainstorming sessions to strategically plan every move that was made on social media. See below for a few rules we implemented to make sure the grand opening of each tenant was supported by 5+B’s social channels.
- Dedicated social media posts across all platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter per tenant within two weeks of grand opening
- Daily Stories sharing recent posts from tenants
- Engagement with recent posts
- Local influencer partnerships
- Event/special promotion support
- 1-minute interview videos with store managers/employee to chat about the new location at 5+B and highlight products
- Product/gift card giveaways
Giveaways
Giveaways are not only a great way to reach your goals (whether that’s growth, email lists, or brand awareness), they are also a great way to give back to your brand’s community. Throughout the last year, we’ve hosted several successful Instagram giveaways. Most notably, leading up to the grand opening, we wanted users to start tuning into all things 5+B before the development opened. So, we partnered with 5+B’s neighbor, the Ryman Auditorium, and hosted a Valentine’s Day giveaway of concert tickets and gift cards to three tenants. This giveaway alone resulted in 1,000+ new followers for 5+B and supported three Fifth + Broadway tenants.
In-App Tools
While it may be a no-brainer to some, the more you can utilize tools within the apps your audience is on, the more you’ll get out of your efforts! For Fifth + Broadway, we utilized Facebook events whenever possible. This is a great way to meet users where they are and grow your following while gaining attention on events. On Instagram, we utilized Story Sticker Countdowns for Grand Opening that sent out reminders to those that subscribed. We utilized the in-app profile promotion feature to get 5+B’s profile right in front of the target audience. Just like how Facebook has a Page Like objective, Instagram has a Profile View objective that is very useful when growing your Instagram following. Instagram also dropped its new feature, Guides, and we created two amazing Guides teasing all of the stores and restaurants opening at 5+B on March 4th. 
Another in-app tool that we utilized early was 5+B’s taggable location, “Fifth + Broadway.” It’s not always human nature to tag accounts in photos, but a lot of the time, people at least tag the location of where they are on Instagram. It’s a simple and aesthetically pleasing feature to document the user’s location. Luckily for us social media managers, community management can be a breeze when all your user-generated content is in a designated place like locations or tagged photos. With all the buzz 5+B was receiving, we started to see multiple questions about parking, hours, etc. on our social channels, so we decided to capitalize on the questions! We posted a Question sticker on Instagram to get all of the questions and turned them into a really cool and resourceful Q&A feed post.
We also created a TapLink for 5+B’s Instagram bio so we could share all news updates, link to the 5+B directory and more. Check it out!
Content Creation
One challenging aspect of social media management for new businesses is that content is scarce. Throughout the past year, we have created daily posts by using tenant UGC photos, creating ultra-shareable graphics and partnering with 5+B tenants with existing stores to create teaser videos.
View this post on Instagram
Even during the week of the grand opening, some tenants had very little content to share before their doors opened. So, on grand opening day, a member of our creative team joined us at 5+B to capture images of all of the new stores and restaurants.
Collaborating with Outside Agencies
We have to give a huge shout-out to all of Fifth + Broadway’s agencies that worked extremely hard to make the grand opening successful. Their PR agency, travel and tourism agency, creative services agency, and many others are to thank for having tens of thousands of Nashville locals show up to shop, eat and have fun at Fifth + Broadway in the first week. After two marketing presentations with 100+ attendees, weekly strategy calls and several incredible news placements, all of our teams’ hard work paid off. We got to see Nashville locals experience Nashville like never before.
Keeping The Momentum
It’s been one month since Fifth + Broadway’s grand opening, and we’ve been sorting through mounds of UGC, Instagram Stories and events to continue to support the tenants of 5+B. It’s been incredible to be a part of such a wonderful new development in Nashville designed to bring fun, laughter and music to the millions of people that will visit 5+B this year.
Since the grand opening, Apple’s third Middle Tennessee store opened at 5+B. Next in the pipeline are openings for Justin Timberlake’s newest venture, The Twelve Thirty Club, a “progressive three-story experience headlined by food and music,” as well as Eddie V’s, a prestigious seafood and steak restaurant.
