Carlsberg shifts spend from TV to social content
Carlsberg is accelerating plans to redirect its marketing budget to social media content and away from traditional channels such as TV after declaring its ability to prove the effectiveness of content marketing is closer to becoming a reality.
The brewer is starting to think of itself as a publisher of entertainment after taking its social media management in-house and away from its advertising agencies. While it still views TV as a key advertising channel, Carlsberg is focused on measuring and improving social media content in the hopes of using it to drive sales as well as engagement.
It is rolling out an “algorithm” to all its markets and marketers to establish a set of best-practice guidelines for distributing the content once a team of brand journalists has created it. Principles range from what the most popular topics associated with brands are and where content performs best on a page, to what time of day works better for video and picture-based posts and the optimum length of a message.
Martin Majlund, group marketing technologist at Carlsberg, told Marketing Week the strategic shift is about targeting smaller consumer segments and communities with content that sits at the intersection of the brand’s positioning and cultural relevance – rather than just posting snippets from its latest ad.
He adds: “We look at social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as mass media. Why create a TV commercial if you don’t have the money to put it on TV. With this mindset we’re much more focused on building engagement around our brands.
“We’re working on projects where we’re trying to look at the return-on-investment of content marketing across different media. It’s about trying to make the correlation between the share of voice our brands have versus sales versus brand health. It’s not something that’s round the corner but I think it’s possible we’ll crack that code as we look into it more. The idea is to put our media spend into areas where we can easily and quickly publish content and then get traction from that.”
The shift comes a year after Carlsberg implemented a platform allowing it to create and share content to social networks including Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for all 500 of its brands. As part of the change, the brewer has been benchmarking its social media work against those of its rivals.
Carlsberg is one of a raft of brands increasing their investment in content marketing over the next 12 months as marketers boost the amount of material distributed via online channels. Almost three quarters (74 per cent) of companies are planning to increase their spending in the discipline in 2014, according to an Econsultancy report.