I Scream for Ice Cream in the Winter
What do you love most about the Canadian Winter? Maybe you’re a fan of curling up in a cozy blanket with a book and a hot chocolate… or what about walking through gently falling snow with your fingers slowly freezing as they clutch a refreshingly cold ice cream cone?
No? So you can see how an ice cream store might have a problem here. How do you drive more customers to an Ice Cream Shop in the winter? At the Social Media Artist, we’re a bunch of very outside-the-cone creative thinkers, so we came up with two unique solutions to warm people up to the idea of eating frozen desserts in the cold weather. First, we went visual and turned their Instagram grid into a game. Then, we went experiential and had an ice cream photoshoot in the snow.
Problem:
How do you drive more customers to an Ice Cream Shop in the winter?
Solution One: Gamify It.
- We created a holiday themed campaign to roll out over the month of December
- We gamified the experience of visiting the Ice Cream Shop’s Instagram page by creating a holiday advent calendar with a new post going up every day. Each post included a short video with a door opening. Behind some of the doors were jokes, while some of them had an announcement for a new giveaway contest followers could enter by commenting on the post. This provided a reason for their Instagram audience to keep going back for more!
Results:
- Consumer engagements and profile views soared, as the Instagram audience was excited to check the grid for a new door to open each day, and would comment and tag friends in order to enter the draw on prize days. Before, the client was getting an average of 11 profile visits each day, and after the campaign we saw this increase to an average of 24 visits per day with their engagement rate increasing by 82%.
- We tagged the winners on Instagram Stories, and they shared these posts to their own networks which increased followers by 5% as more people found out about the Advent calendar campaign. A direct message with an image of a redeemable coupon was also sent to the winner, and this was the message they were to show at the shop to claim their prize.
- Prizes included coupons for BOGO desserts, cake for two, and free ice cream, so winners were encouraged to bring friends along when they claimed their prize. This drove consumer traffic to the store, which created more opportunities for social media posts as winners would post their very Instagrammable desserts and tag the shop to say thank you.
Solution Two: Steer into the Cold.
- We came up with a catchy hashtag and created a series of posts about how a “true Canadian” still eats ice cream in the snow, and challenged followers to embrace the cold and tag us in their photos
- We planned a photoshoot where the models wore summer clothes while posing in the snow with the client’s ice cream and branding. As a team of artists, we were able to round up a diverse group of models, performers, and dancers, and had a successful winter photoshoot that included both snowball fights and sundresses!
Results:
- This campaign launched in February, which was usually a very quiet month at the Ice Cream Shop with less user-generated content to share. These photos provided the client with shareable content of customers enjoying the product and interacting with the brand, so their Instagram feed stayed current and populated with faces during the slower season.
- We tagged the models in the new posts, and they were quick to share the posts to their own networks and talk about their experience at the unique photoshoot. This increased engagement and followers, and generated buzz around the campaign and the brand. We also provided each of the models with a few professional photos from their individual shoots so they could post and tag the Ice Cream Shop on their own pages.
