Sal’s Pizza Company is a beloved local restaurant in Algonquin, IL. They serve delicious food at affordable prices and are an active part of their community. It is our pleasure to amplify their brand through our many marketing services.
One of the services we provide for Sal’s is social media. We manage their social pages on multiple platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Their Facebook page is particularly popular, having garnered over 1,000 page likes from their loyal customers.
However, there’s a difference between being a popular page and a successful page. Despite the many page likes, Sal’s post engagement was underwhelming. Their followers weren’t interacting with their posts enough to garner more attention for the page.
Therefore, we made it our goal to use the page’s large following to its advantage. We began planning a social marketing campaign that would get their customers excited about Sal’s again.
One of the best tactics a Facebook page can use to engage its followers is to hold a contest. We knew that Sal’s audience already loved the restaurant. So, the prospect of getting free stuff from them was sure to attract their engagement. We talked it over with Sal (the owner of Sal’s) and settled on a t-shirt and gift card as the prize for the contest winner.
Now that we had our enticing prize, we went to work planning the contest. We decided the contest should be a multi-step process so that we could create a post for each step and capitalize on the reach and engagement each post would receive.
The first post we created was a post announcing the contest. The premise was simple: comment on this post with a picture of your best “hangry face.” We made entry as easy as possible so that the post would receive plenty of comments. In the post, we also set a deadline for submissions and made it clear what the prize would be for the winner.
Once the submission deadline had passed, we sorted through the many comments we received and picked our three favorites. We then created another post announcing the three finalists and inviting Sal’s followers to vote on their favorite picture. Once again, we made voting as simple as possible by assigning a letter to each photo and asking people to comment with the letter of their choice.
The post received over 100 comments from people voting for their favorite. The finalists also did their part to get the word out by sharing the post and asking their friends to vote for their picture. As a result, people who hadn’t even heard of Sal’s were now engaging with the post.
After voting had closed, we tallied up the votes and created a final post congratulating the winner of the contest. This post also received quite a bit of engagement from people congratulating the winner as well as the winner herself thanking Sal’s for the awesome prize.
Our contest was by far the most successful series of posts that the page had ever had. In the month during which the contest ran, the number of engaged people increased by 159% and the page received over 7,000 viral impressions.
Due to this spike in attention, the page also accrued 20 new page likes. This increase was by far the biggest jump in likes the page had received in over a year. And it’s all because we created something engaging and fun for their followers to get excited about.
Sal’s Pizza is still enjoying the residual effects of our efforts to this day. People are now more excited to comment on and engage with Sal’s posts, and they can’t wait until the next contest. We’re glad we were able to bring well-deserved notoriety to such a fine eating establishment.