In class yesterday, we had the privilege of having a guest speaker from A&W´s social marketing team, he explained to us their strategy when deciding to enter Facebook. Much to my surprise, A&W only made its Facebook debut in 2013, making it one of the last major brands in Canada to join the social network. Nevertheless, this had its advantages, they were able to see what worked and what hadn´t on other brands.
After hearing the speech, I wanted to share these insights with you. A&W´s strategy concentrated in 3 main points:
- Connect
- Engage
- Influence
Their main objective was to acquire likes from those that really felt passionate and loved the brand, true fans. So instead of offering fancy prices if consumers liked their page, the burger chain simply asked:
Short but effective. Through this simple question, A&W´s social marketing team assured themselves that only those who were truly interested in the brand formed part of the Facebook page. A brilliant tactic to identify A&W´s true fans and screen out those who simply want to “contaminate” the page and the brand.
In order to engage, A&W tries to post things that are in coherence with Facebook user’s news-feed, posts that resonate with us and that can identify with: a child enjoying her smoothie, a mother with her fries…. A transmission of happiness when you eat at A&W.
When it comes to influencing, A&W tries to communicate that their meat products don´t contain any artificial by-products. The strategy used to effectively communicate this is creating posts that are initially targeted towards customized audiences so a good first response is achieved.
The intention is that these three strategies are in coherence with each other. Although I understand that sometimes it´s inevitable to put adverts, A&W´s recent posts are too commercial. They emphasize too much how their products are not produced by animals who are given antibiotics, show too much product and not enough contextualized situations. The result, not enough content that consumers can identify with and posts that are just one more advert on A&W´s fans news-feed, breaking the coherence between the three strategies plus increasing the likelihood of Facebook users scrolling past the posts and not engaging.
My recommendation, get creative again, influence and engage with posts that complement each other and attract consumers interest.