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SOCIAL MEDIA HELPS RAISE THE DOUGH
ОглавлениеIn 1987, the Cole brothers established a family restaurant in Irving, TX, with a focus on friendly service and simple, handmade. Italian food. Today, i Fratelli Pizza (www.ifratellipizza.com), which now focuses on pizza, has grown to 20 locations since its start. The company has always valued charitable giving and active involvement in the community.
Courtesy of i Fratelli Pizza
The company began using social media in 2010 as a no-cost method for staying “top of mind” with its patrons. Starting with Facebook, i Fratelli soon added a blog called “The Sauce,” followed by Twitter and Instagram.
As it approached its 25th anniversary in 2012, the company decided to involve the community in its charity efforts, creating a weekly promotion called Pizza DoughNation, which is still an active promotion today. Residents nominate locally based nonprofits, churches, and high school booster clubs to receive 15 percent of the value of orders placed on a specific day using the recipient’s name, as seen in the following blog. The website also includes a description of the program, a nomination form, and tips for organizations to promote their fundraiser themselves.
At that time, while giving grew, so did site traffic, Facebook likes, viral sharing, sales, and positive branding. “The DoughNation program allowed us to appeal to a new specific market (for example, a congregation or booster club) weekly, plus it gave us content to talk about across all platforms,” former Marketing Manager Rachel Black explained. The specific results, even in the first few months of the program, were impressive: a tripling of Facebook impressions, a five-fold growth in retweets on Twitter, and a growth in ROI (in terms of increased sales) of more than 300 percent.
The company and the receiving organization both used social media to promote the fundraiser. For i Fratelli, that meant using tweets for geotargeted messaging, cross-promoting among Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the blog, and identifying influencers to tell the story.
While Black found that Facebook is the best channel to drive participation in Pizza DoughNation, she always promoted the fundraisers on all its channels. (See an example on its Twitter feed in the nearby figure.) At the same time, the sponsored organization shares the promotional burden by publicizing the fundraiser among its own members and supporters.
Courtesy of i Fratelli Pizza
Black said that at the time, the company spent about 20 hours per week on social media, with one team member creating all the social content in-house for four to five posts per week for the restaurant. Initially, i Fratelli used an outside agency to create and implement the master promotional campaign for DoughNation but now handles that in-house as well.
Although Black used Google Analytics to monitor a pay-per-click AdWords campaign for the restaurant business, she didn’t actively monitor social statistics. While she occasionally did a Facebook ad campaign to promote a specific sweepstakes or event, Black spent less than $500 total on Facebook-sponsored posts.
While the DoughNation campaign seems simple, it was carefully planned and executed. Black pointed out that it’s critical to target the correct audience when promoting a fundraiser on social media. “Our DoughNation organizations have specific, sometimes small, groups of supporters, which need to be targeted directly.” Organizations get the best results when they use their own platforms to reach their audience and schedule the promotion in advance.
“It’s important to use social media to your best advantage by understanding how others utilize the platforms,” Black advised. “For instance, we will tag influencers such as the Convention and Visitors Bureau on DoughNation posts so they can retweet to their followers. The more post and re-post action you can capitalize on, the wider your audience. We also take the time to engage with others’ posts weekly; when it comes time for our promotions, we have a captive audience ready to return the favor.”
The following list of sites constitute i Fratelli’s web presence:
www.facebook.com/ifratellipizza
https://twitter.com/iFratelliPizza
