Pizza Pie Caught Your Eye
Commercials involving food have always prompted a trip to the kitchen or a reach for my cellphone to place an order for something to satisfy my real or imaginary appetite. Food service companies use similar and new strategies online that closely align with their business goals.
Although, I am not one of their followers, Domino’s is a company that is constantly featured on my Instagram news feed lately. Since they are a very well-known brand nationwide, they choose to focus on the middle and endpoint of the sales funnel, engagement and conversion.
Their vision is to be the leader in the pizza restaurant and delivery market. While I’m sure they would also like to increase their sales in add-ons like wings and other sides, their ultimate mission is to increase pizza sales. I would imagine their objective is determined by the number of pizzas sold nationwide last year. By using social media as a channel for this goal, I noticed they have aligned several social strategies to meet this goal.
The first strategy utilized on their Instagram and Twitter accounts would be considered a people’s champion strategy. Due to Covid-19, they are consistently posting about their contactless home delivery and restaurant car side delivery options. They also insist that the only hands to touch your pizza are yours and provide links to more detail about their cleanliness and safety precautions during the pandemic. A message from their CEO, Rich Allison, is also linked to one of their posts. These messages serve to emphasize to their customers how much they care about their community and they people they serve.
Instagram is your bread and butter if your business is selling a “visual” product and Domino’s is great at using this social medium to their advantage, posting pictures filled with piping-hot pizzas, wings, brownies, and other sides to help draw customers in. Below these posts they announce special pizza deals, but they also ask customers questions to keep them engaged. Some that I noticed involved questions about favorite toppings, wing flavors, or wing and dip combinations. This is a great way to increase their potential customers’ sense of desire for their product which could quickly escalate to a quick call or app request for a Domino’s delivery.
Domino’s also uses the contest strategy to increase engagement. Recently, they promoted a contest to both Instagram and Twitter asking customers to submit creative home videos that involve a unique or funny Domino’s home or car side delivery experience. Then, they asked the Twitter world to choose the winner from their top contenders. Once chosen, the winner received a year of free pizza nights. This served their mission two-fold. They obtained and shared customer-generated content and the contest greatly increased their engagement rates with hundreds of retweets, shares, and comments which I’m sure both contributed to an increase in their conversions.
One last strategy that interested me was their recognition of their impact on our environment. They helped plant 50,000 trees after asking Twitter to vote on what region they should plant them in. Besides that, they debunked a common belief that pizza boxes aren’t recyclable once they are soiled with pizza grease and provided a link to help their Twitter followers find out how their municipality handles pizza box recycling. These types of posts appeals to their followers’ sense of environmental responsibility instead of their tastebuds and is a great way to show that they are not just on social to sell pizzas, but also to educate and show they care about deeper issues.
While analyzing their Twitter and Instagram accounts, I’ve noticed much like other food service companies, they use Twitter as their customer service portal for addressing post-sale issues or concerns. It seemed like their entire tweets and replies section was filled with customers complaining about how their delivery driver did not follow the contactless delivery protocol, their pizza did not look like the pizzas in the advertisements when they arrived, or how they never received their pizza delivery. Since the company did not address these comments publicly but suggested that each person direct message them for assistance, I do not know if Domino’s is truly building customer loyalty and resolving issues via Twitter. I can only hope they are because if not, they have no hope of fulfilling their vision. You do not just want to try to offer a better product than your competitors, you want to listen and respond to your target audience. This is the best way to build trust and gain loyal customers.
In order to increase their return on investment, one of the key performance indicators they should be evaluating would be their cost per click and cost per lead on each platform. They would also be wise to review the amount of online orders on the website due to their social media activity. In regard to strengthening customer loyalty, their method of streamlining all complaints to their direct messaging inbox would better enable them to count the number of issues resolved. All of these metrics would allow them to effectively track their success over time and adjust their efforts accordingly. Knowing what metrics to look at and using them to tailor your tactics is really the way to win on social media.
Overall, while Domino’s may have some deep-seated issues that they need to resolve at the store level, so that their marketing message reflects the company’s practices, they do know how to align their business goals with their social media strategies. At the end of the day, your executive team doesn’t care about follower count. They care about market share, growth, profitability, customer experience, and shareholder value. It’s your job, as a marketer, to adjust your activity in a way that satisfies the objectives of the business as a whole.