How baked beans and Weetabix can help your social media strategy

2nd March 2021

By Carys Geer, client services director at PR and marketing agency brookscomm

 

Do you eat your Weetabix with baked beans? If you didn’t see it, a Weetabix tweet recently went viral after the brand suggested that topping your Weetabix with Heinz baked beans was a viable breakfast option. Brands replied with puns, gags and jokes that kept consumers and other brands alike engaged.

The post got Weetabix and the contributing brands some impressive social media engagement – with over 250,000 interactions on Twitter for Weetabix alone. It didn’t stop there: Sainsbury’s saw a 15% sales uplift in Weetabix cereal the following week.

At a time where there’s more emphasis on digital marketing channels in the midst of the pandemic, what impact will the brand’s contributions have on consumers for the long term?

 

Join the conversation

This social media event is proof that whoever your target audience is, people buy from people. Audiences are humans looking to engage with another human, and a bit of lightheartedness keeps our spirits up.

Customer centricity is not just about how you engage with your customers. It’s about the reputation you have, what you do when you don’t know if your customers are looking and how you present yourself to the world.

 

Avoid the status quo

By having an awareness of consumer perception, knowing what the brand wants to achieve and how to engage with its target customers, Weetabix has developed a social media strategy fueled with creativity which helps the brand challenge the norm and resonate with consumers.

It is easy to stick to what you know when it comes to marketing activity, but brands need to innovate to ensure that they are reaching their target customers and their content is engaging.

 

Give messaging the time it deserves

Not all brands got their replies to Weetabix quite right: some jumped in to promote themselves, lacked creativity or simply weren’t that memorable. It’s a lesson in the importance of creativity and tight brand messaging.

Messaging isn’t just what you say, but how you say it, when and why. A style guide for tone of voice that is easy to follow allows brands to respond to opportunities quickly, whatever the communications channel.

Whether you’re bold enough to try baked beans on your Weetabix or not, it’s impossible to ignore that the pandemic has advanced the shift in how brands communicate with consumers. It’s now more important than ever for brands to review their social media strategy to ensure they are reaching prospective customers effectively.

For more information on building a social media or content strategy, please get in touch at www.brookscomm.com.