McDonalds

McDonald's desired to introduce their new McCafe product and in-store redesign with the goal of building product awareness, sampling, and reaching local influencers.

The campaign integrated live events, email and Facebook marketing, text messaging, radio and print media, banner advertising, and public relations components.

Challenge

Build brand awareness and sampling opportunities for a new McCafe, a new McDonald's coffee product and store redesign. 

Highlights

• Successfully linked event and social media marketing campaigns
• Increased traffic to branded web properties and brick and mortar locations

Background

McDonald's introduced McCafe, a product category of coffee drinks and in-store redesign, with the goal of gaining a significant share of the retail coffee business and incrementally increase store sales from existing products.

Objective

Implement a dynamic urban event and social marketing campaign in multiple markets to increase consumer awareness, drive participating store visits, promote product offerings, and complement the retailer’s upcoming television and print campaign.

Solution

We created a grassroots consumer awareness program for the new McCafe products and store locations.

In conjunction with First Fridays United, our team developed a seven-city event and social media marketing campaign.  The campaign integrated live social events, email and Facebook marketing, text messaging, radio and print media, banner advertising, and public relations components.

The McCafe live events were well attended and supported by email, text messaging, print, and radio advertising. Each event included product sampling and couponing to drive in-store visits.

In addition, we held multiple volunteer community service events with the Ronald McDonald House and a business networking event with a prominent McDonald store owner as keynote speaker.

All campaign activities were supported by online marketing components which included a robust website site, local banner advertising, extensive email marketing, and Facebook marketing. This integration allowed any new events to be easily added to all digital properties and created content such as photos from previous events, product shots, etc. to be broadcast to tens of thousands of people with only a few clicks.

Results

As a result of this campaign, McDonald's experienced a significant increase in product awareness among the targeted urban demographic. The McCafe brand received over 2,500,000 impressions via email, radio, print, text messaging, and social networks.

In addition, the brand received a “cool” or “hip” factor from association with the live events that were attended by over 5,000 trendsetting influencers including local and national celebrities. The campaign produced increased web property traffic of over 413% and a considerable increase in coupon redemption and participating store sales which were tracked by McDonald's.