Jack’s, a regional fast-food restaurant with 120 stores across Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia, is making a national footprint with its recent social-media campaigns.
The company, known for its family atmosphere, fresh burgers, and hand-dipped shakes, has embraced social media to engage new customers and better serve the ones it already has.
“Over the past year, we have strategically addressed every marketing vehicle we have, updating, revamping, repurposing, or creating from scratch a loud voice to reach customers,” says Jack’s director of marketing Pam Measel. “We’ve taken a new approach using networking sites like Pinterest and flash-based technology to build brand awareness.”
Most recently, Jack’s launched its Holiday Jingle Head promotion that allows users to “become part of a movie” by uploading their faces into a video and “starring” in it.
The flash-based creation uses one of Jack’s most successful commercials, in which carolers sing a Jack’s Christmas jingle. Users are able to upload their faces to one or all of the carolers to create their own unique Christmas commercial.
The Super Group Member Ken Martino worked with Jack’s to develop the campaign as a way to promote the company online to consumers and encourage them to share their branded Jack's movie across social media.
“As with all online engagement, it’s about building brand awareness,” Martino says. “The Holiday Jingle Head campaign creates a fun, interactive experience for Jack’s online community.
“The end result of each Jingle Head video is usually very entertaining and is something that organically encourages people to share with family and friends, thus driving traffic back to the Jack's site for others to create their own videos and learn about Jack’s,” he adds.
Just two weeks after launching the campaign on November 16, Holiday Jingle Heads had received 2,131,279 total impressions, with nearly 1,000 videos shared and an uncommonly high click-through rate of .14 percent.
Today, that number has nearly tripled. The campaign will run through December 29, 2012.
“These numbers represent the importance of connecting with the customer from an entertainment standpoint,” Measel says.
Earlier this year, the company launched Jack’s Ultimate Tailgating Giveaway that invited users to “Pin It to Win It” on Pinterest.
“The campaign showed how influential Pinterest users could be by representing our brand,” Measel says. “With every pin, Jack’s was seen by new people. The same is true with our interactions on other sites like Facebook. The more people that interact with us online, the more people will become familiar with Jack’s.”
According to Pinfluencer.com, Pinterest is the fastest-growing social media channel in history, the third-largest social network, and the fourth-largest driver of Web traffic.
In addition, Pinfluencer.com reported in July that an average Pinner drives between 40 cents and $4 in revenue a month; 1,000 Pinners drive between eight and 65 purchases a month; and an average Pinner drives between four and 30 page views a month.
Before launching the campaign, Jack’s had four followers on Pinterest. After only a few months of Jack’s Ultimate Tailgating Giveaway, the company now has more than 200 followers, which is more than White Castle and Krystal, and is closing in on larger competitors like Wendy’s, which has around 500 followers.
The campaign generated 171,000 impressions.
Part of that success came from the chance of being rewarded for participating in the promotion. The Ultimate Tailgating Giveaway grand-prize winner, a woman from Gadsden, Alabama, won a Vizio 42-inch LCD HDTV E-Series, a Weber Q100 portable gas grill, a 10-foot-by-10-foot canopy, and a 4-foot folding table and four folding chairs.
“Social media evens the playing field between companies like Jack’s and the bigger brands with large budgets,” Measel says. “We’ve been successful in reaching all demographics. We are a family company and have many advocates on the ground in the communities we serve. Now, through social media, we have advocates online, as well.”
