5 Traits Of A Successful Campaign: Craft Beer Case Study

One innocuous day a few months ago, we dropped a 12er of Full Sail Brewing’s Session stubbies in the Ignition conference room and lit up our whiteboard. The goal: to craft a strategy for the Session Summer Campaign.

While every type of business needs powerful content marketing, one of our favorite industries to produce creative campaigns for is food and beverage. We’re no strangers to the beer aisle or the tap house and we know firsthand that it’s a downright rainbow of colors and brands. Our job—make Session pop.

Before we put pen to whiteboard, we set the parameters.

The ideal audience for our sweepstakes was beer drinkers aged 21-35. Why? Research shows that millennials use mobile devices, share more, and drink more craft beer than any other group (but we hardly needed stats to tell us this). Plus, we thought this group would be the most excited about the grand prize: an all-expense paid trip to Hood River. Score.

1. Tell Meaningful, Relatable Stories

To keep content fresh and engaging, we broke the summer narrative into three month-long ‘sessions’.

What better place for our sessions to play out than in Full Sail’s own backyard? We brainstormed the best of the Columbia River Gorge and put it into action in unexpected ways. Who knew forced perspective on a mountain bike with a stubby Session bottle could look so cool?

2. Portray Your Brand Authentically

While it was important to portray the daily giveaway prizes, we wanted to ensure that not only did they feel interesting and engaging, but authentically tied to the brand.

One of Full Sail’s most important brand stories is their water sources and how they brew as sustainably as possible. The careful process sharply reduces the amount of water needed and thus, keeps most of it in our backyard playground: rivers and lakes. We chose to make most of our stories water-centric and captured some incredible sights from just outside of Full Sail’s back door.

3. Use Personalization and Targeting

Facebook’s bells and whistles are great for targeting people geographically and honing in on their personal interests. We chose specific bits of content to boost to carefully crafted audiences in the hopes that they would see it, like it, and share it.

Additionally, we magnified our social reach and engagement with content built around seasonal and Full Sail events. This included things like the Summer X-Games and Independence Day.

Last, our curated content was supportive of industry influencers, partners and Full Sail sponsored events like Hood to Coast, Kiteboarding 4 Cancer, and the Oregon Brewfest. By joining a conversation that was already gaining traction with our target audience, we were able to ride off the momentum and give content a boost without spending extra money.

4. Push for Video/Post only High-Quality Photos

We produced video and imagery that featured six different local, beloved locations. From the hero dirt of Post Canyon to a chill scene on the Hood River to a high-energy lakeside gathering, we employed drone videography and photography that does these sacred local places justice.

These locations are well traveled and well known throughout our community and beyond, and it was a fun challenge capturing it all from a new angle. We know first hand that video outperforms stillevery time, so we made it a top priority to style it, direct it, then set it in motion.

5. Choose the Right Cadence

We created 50+ custom video and image assets, plus over 50 pieces of curated content. With a regular cadence, we watched our audience and engagement grow. The episodic nature of the campaign reinvigorated the story—from the beginning of summer vibes, to the full swing of summer (sun’s out, buns out), to those final days where we’re all trying to squeeze every bit of fun out of the warm days.

Posting regularly is crucial to the success of a campaign like this—people want to see new, fresh content on the regular. Without well-time contact with your audience, even the sharpest creative can get ousted.

Overall, we saw excellent engagement and huge sweepstakes entry numbers after our Session Summer came to a close. We were able to give the Full Sail email subscriber list an incredible boost, and solidify relationships with strategic partners throughout Hood River and beyond. And best of all, we got to elevate one of our all-time favorite beers: Session Lager.

Want to talk details? Think you’ll need a sharp social campaign of your own? Hit us up. We’ll hit you back.