A couple of weeks ago we started a new series to showcase innovative earned media campaigns by industry.This week we’ll take a look at Quick Serve Restaurants aka fast food or casual. This includes such brands as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Subway and Dunkin Donuts. As Marketers who work for brands like these can attest – it’s highly competitive and can be challenging to change the conversation online.
Millennials obtain peer advice for making restaurant decisions more regularly than non-Millennials and 62% report using social sites. And according to the 2013 NRA Forecast, nearly 43% of quick service customers are Millennials between the ages of 18-34. As many marketers are already aware, word-of-mouth recommendations have become critical to a brand’s success. At Klout, we’ve worked with hundreds of brands and found that there are three universal components to making user-generated content work for your brand. Let’s take a look at how a few top quick serve brands are able to capture their audience’s attention using these core steps.
1. Know and understand your audience’s interests and passions.
Subway is a great example of a brand successfully reaching their audience by understanding them. A report done by Technomic Inc. found that Subway was a leader in creating memorable and relatable advertising. One of their most popular and probably best known campaigns was with Jared Fogle. By pairing an average person such as Jared with famous athletes the brand was able to make their ads not only memorable, but relatable. The core lesson here is that a brand’s communication needs to provide an understanding of how the brand fits into the consumer’s lifestyle. In order to successfully deliver such a message, marketers need to understand who their audience is to know what will resonate.
2. Find a creative way to engage your audience based on those interests.
Once a brand truly understands their consumers, they can find innovative ways to engage them. McDonald’s is known for adapting their restaurants based on unique qualities of their target market. As they strive to maintain the loyalty of their Millennial customers they have also begun to adapt their marketing tactics on social media. For example, McDonald’s Canada recently launched a #MakeMyFilm campaign where they encouraged followers to think up a film plot that highlights an item off their menu. The top 12 were selected and short films created based on them. In addition, prizes were awarded for the best ideas, which include movie passes and gift cards.
3. Positively promote the content your users create.
Dunkin’ Donuts has been asking their consumers “What Are You Drinkin’?” via ads for a while now. However, there was much more behind the campaign than simply asking their customers what they like to drink. Using the hashtag #MyDunkin’ they were able to track hundreds of thousands of Tweets to learn what their customers were drinking and evolve the campaign over time to share the content generated as a result of the ads. This enabled the brand to not only engage their customer base, but to also increase the scale and reach of awareness through word-of-mouth marketing.
Start engaging your audience to help share your brand story. Klout Perks can help, learn how.
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