Carlsberg is running tests to close the gap between online chatter and beer sales
Carlsberg is testing a number of digital activations to detect the link between its online media spend and sales of beer.
Working with Falcon.io, which recently rebranded from Falcon Social to offer a wider focus on customer experience management, the Danish brewer is running an experiment in the UK market to see how it can zone in on a specific audience and drive what they’re talking about around beer and lager.
“By targeting that specific audience with a different type of communication than we normally see we can actually drive what people are speaking about in another direction than previously,” Carlsberg head of global marketing technology, Martin Majlund told The Drum.
It's a plan predicated on the perception of Carlsberg’s beers in the UK. To that end, the brewer is tracking social media conversations to figure out when people are talking about craft beers and lager so that it can use those insights to enrich the communications it is already doing. Those learnings can then be used to pivot perception and make the brand stronger using these insights rather than running activity it thinks it should be doing.
While yet to see the results of the endeavour, Carlsberg is confident the strategy will help drive brand equity.
Elsewhere the brewer is using programmatic and mobile technology to see how it can relate its media spend to sales, something historically difficult to measure given that Carlsberg doesn’t sell its own product.
“If I had a new commercial it would be pretty easy to see what the conversion is for the £100 I spend on media and we don’t have that right now,” Majlund said. “So the interesting part is closing that gap and figuring out how much ROI do we drive on our media spend across the channels and what we are doing now is closing that gap.
“With the mobile revolution the interesting part is that we now know people’s whereabouts and it’s interesting for us to see how we can test out other formats and mobile technology where we can hit people where they are. So basic stuff like programmatic buying so buying audiences at a specific time, so if it’s a Thursday we know people want to go out for a beer between 6pm and 8pm we can ad serve vouchers and drive footfall to a specific location so I can prove correlation between that media spend and driving footfall that isn’t something I’ve been able to do before.”
Carlsberg is also working to reduce the bounce rate on its digital sites given age gating regulations, which currently stands at around 50-80 per cent.
“We’ve used social for a long time [which has a natural age barrier given that users have to include a date of birth to open a profile] and now we are actually seeing through other tests that we can reduce the bounce rate dramatically if we also have premium content on our web platform so we are trying to work more on mobile to use these as destinations.”