McDonald’s to step up content marketing efforts

Fast food giant McDonald’s has revealed that it is planning to strengthen its content marketing efforts during the next 12 months and will create and publish an estimated 5,000 articles, videos and images in order to deliver a “more valuable” experience to customers.

McDonald’s CMO, Deborah Wahl, revealed the digital content plans at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s IAB Mixx Conference on Monday and highlighted several successful examples of its online marketing campaigns on platforms including YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat.

“In the last two years, we’ve created approximately 2,500 pieces of marketing content a year,” Wahl said. “This year, we will create roughly 5,000 pieces of marketing content, so we’re making more content, but we’re also challenging ourselves to make our content much more valuable to our customers.”

Curated moments

Snapchat has been a particularly useful channel for driving brand awareness and reach for McDonald’s after the fast food giant set up geofilters with an image of French fries at thousands of its restaurants across the globe. These filters, which launched in 2015, can be added to users’ photos and have since generated 308 million views and been used on 12 million occasions.

McDonald’s claims that this approach has helped to add a certain degree of “playfulness” into the emerging culture of curated moments. The restaurant chain has also stepped up its content efforts on Twitter and Facebook, having written 143,000 notes to consumers. Wahl added:  “That means we have a lot of room to go and do a lot more communication.”

Mobile is also a main focus for the company, and it recently introduced a way for customers to personalise their orders via its mobile app, which had been downloaded more than ten million times since being released last year. The app also provides users with new deals and coupons through push notifications driven by data analytics.

“I really think we’ve tried to define media and marketing very narrowly,” Wahl concluded. “We label the ways we talk to people, but marketing communication is no longer executed via separate vehicles – digital, broadcast, print or mobile. Defining marketing by these channel-based labels is actually absurd in today’s world.”