Client case: SkrotSmart, seventeen locations that each sound local

The client and the problem

SkrotSmart is a metal recycling chain within the Vinning group, running drive-through recycling sites from Trelleborg to Umeå. The business is deliberately local: customers know their own site, the people who work there and the offers that apply where they live. That is exactly why every location has its own Instagram account rather than one national feed.

The problem is what happens next. Seventeen local accounts need seventeen streams of content, and the staff at each site are there to weigh and value scrap metal, not to write captions. Local communication was never their job and rarely their interest. In practice the work fell to one central marketer, and a chain of seventeen accounts is more than one person can keep alive by hand.

The data shows it clearly. In the twelve months before Ayra, the chain's local accounts published 197 posts between them, but the distribution was the real problem: one site published 54 times, while several published once in a whole year. The median location managed seven posts in twelve months. Some accounts existed without ever really being used.

What Ayra changed

SkrotSmart's brand, tone of voice and campaign frameworks are configured once, centrally. Ayra then produces the content for each location inside those frameworks, adapted to that site: its town, its opening hours, its Saturday openings, its offers. One person steers the whole chain, and every location still sounds like itself.

Nothing about the local feel was traded away for scale. The opposite happened: locations that had been effectively silent now have a living account.

“Seventeen accounts was never a question of ambition, it was a question of hours. Now every site has a living account without anyone out there having to become a communicator, and they still sound like their own place.”

Maria Knutsson, CMO Vinning

Twelve months later: the numbers

Comparing the twelve months before Ayra with the twelve months on Ayra, across SkrotSmart's local Instagram accounts:

• Published content went from 197 posts to 1,950, close to ten times as much, across the same chain.
• All seventeen locations now publish every week, roughly twice a week each. Before, only a handful were meaningfully active.
• The gap between locations closed. Posts per location went from a range of 1 to 54 a year, median 7, to a range of 98 to 118, median 108.
• Reach across the local accounts grew more than fivefold, from roughly 150,000 to roughly 770,000.
• New followers went from 16 to 1,568 across the chain's local accounts.
• Shares went from 7 to 331, and comments from 52 to 463.

“It no longer matters which site you follow. They are all equally alive, and that was never the case before.”

Maria Knutsson, CMO Vinning

What the result actually shows

The interesting number is not the growth, it is the evenness. A chain with one strong account and sixteen quiet ones does not have a local presence, it has one enthusiastic site manager. What changed at SkrotSmart is that local presence stopped depending on who happened to be interested in Instagram.

That is the shape of the problem for most multi-location brands. The work is not hard, it is simply too much of it, spread across too many people who were hired to do something else. Set the frameworks once, produce inside them locally, and a task that needed seventeen willing communicators needs one.