The fast food giant is looking to double its content marketing output as it bids to drive engagement with customers
At the recent Interactive Advertising Bureau’s IAB Mixx Conference, McDonald’s CMO Deborah Wahl declared that the company had created 2,500 pieces of marketing content a year for the last two years. In the next year, she said, the plan was to increase that to 5,000.
McDonald’s has a clear brand identity as the largest hamburger chain in the world. In a bid to strengthen and spread that brand, it has employed a number of approaches towards content marketing.
Playfulness
On social media, McDonald’s takes a playful approach to customer interaction.
On Snapchat, it does more than just sending out Snapchat Stories to followers. For example it has set up a french fries geofilter for each one of its 14,000 restaurants in America – allowing customers to personalise their snaps with their location and encouraging a constant slew of user-generated content.
McDonald’s was an early adopter of the geofilter function, and it has been a great success. Wahl said the filter had so far been used 12 million times and generated 308 million views since its launch last autumn.
Customer service
With an enormous volume of interaction on social media (the business receives one mention every two seconds in the USA alone), another notable aspect of McDonald’s strategy has been a commitment to responding to as many of these comments and queries as possible.
For example, McDonald’s Canada used a highly effective campaign to open the conversation channels between business and customer with ‘Our Food, Your Questions’.
It opened the floodgates to customer queries – good and bad – and answered more than 10,000 in total.
Instead of avoiding the awkward questions posed such as ‘are your fries made of plastic?’ and ‘how long has McDonald’s used pink slime in their hamburgers?’, it answered them squarely and frankly. This openness is a key part of the content marketing output: which has been described as “promoting information, instead of the company itself.”
No secret sauce
A noticeable element of a lot of the content produced by McDonald’s is the amount of nutritional information provided.
Its website has a nutrition calculator at the top of the page and there has been much effort made in transparency about where the food comes from.
Aware of the reputation (and sometimes the urban myths) surrounding how fast food is sourced, McDonald’s is not hiding from the questions – instead it is tackling the issue head on, often in innovative ways.
Such as the Track My Macca’s app from McDonald’s Australia. The app recognises which restaurant you are in, scans the food you’re about to eat and then tracks where the ingredients have come from to get to you. A 3D animation shows the process from farm to plate and there are case studies from some of the farmers involved.
As people become increasingly media savvy and wise to any sense of manipulation from companies, promoting information is likely to be more sympathetically received by the audience.
In the modern world of hyper-fast information at everyone’s fingertips, content marketing is an effective way of controlling the discourse around your business. In a much-maligned industry such as fast food, McDonald’s is aiming for a sense of clarity about its products, as well as dispelling any myths.
Effective content marketing based around the distribution of information can be a mutually empowering tool for business and customer alike. It used to be that the most you would walk away with from McDonald’s was the toy from a Happy Meal, but in 2016 that offering has been super-sized.
