Carlsberg shifts from product-led to ‘share-worthy’ marketing
Carlsberg Group has centralised its social media marketing in a bid to tap into the real-life stories involving all its brands and create above-the-line advertising activity inspired by content from its advocates.
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The Danish brewer has launched a platform that allows its marketers to create and distribute content to social networks including Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for all 500 of its brands. It is using the tool to gauge how well campaigns are performing in real-time as well as identifying the best strategies for recruiting fans.
Carlsberg wants the platform to cover the whole lifecycle of its marketing campaigns as it looks to to grow its online fanbase, drive engagement and generate more mentions than its rivals.
The social platform is the first phase of Carlsberg’s efforts to implement a group-wide strategy that uses what the business says are “everyday” stories from its fans in future advertising campaigns.
Martin Majlund, group digital platform manager at Carlsberg, told Marketing Week the venture gives the business a “better-understanding” of its social marketing programmes at a time when it can “damage or even destroy a brand.”
He adds: “We’re focusing on creating much more share-worthy stories. It’s about us taking a step back from the regular product-orientated stories we’ve done in the past and trying to tap into real-life stories that our audiences can actually engage with. We’re looking at how we can cascade this approach to our above-the-line activity. That’s the fight we’re having internally at the moment as we try to develop a more consistent strategy across all our marketing channels.”
The launch follows a two-year audit that saw the business cull Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube channels to present a united front through global profiles instead of local pages. However, following the launch of Facebook Global Pages last year the brand reverted back to customised pages for each country to drive better engagement from metrics such as likes, people talking about this and check-ins.
The platform, developed in partnership with software developer Falcon Social, can also be accessed by Carlsberg’s agencies although the business says it will assume full management of social media marketing.
Majlund adds: “We now have one point of entry for all markets to communicate to social media platforms. All the big brewers are fighting for social media now. We want the Carlsberg brand to be the most talked about beer brand on social media.
“Two years ago nobody in the business was really working with social media but now we have a much bigger team of people working across the different social networks and we hope the platform can develop our insight.”