Dairy Queen's Promoted Tweets Swing for the Fences
Quick-serve chain targets baseball fans on Twitter.
Dairy Queen has been learning how to play the Twitter marketing game and appears to have brought home a win on baseball’s Opening Day. The quick-serve chain has been running Promoted Tweets for “#openingday,” which was a trending topic for much of Thursday.
Jamie Guse, senior digital marketing manager for Dairy Queen, told ClickZ that his team decided to place a bid on the baseball-oriented hash-tag after recently seeing success on the micro-blogging site. Since March 22, they have been testing Promoted Tweets for “#dairyqueen” and “#minicooper”. It’s part of an effort to promote a video contest for the brand’s “Mini Blizzard” ice cream treats where six winners will get a free Mini Cooper car.
Specifically, Dairy Queen purchased “#dairyqueen” on March 24. On that day, as it coincidentally turned out, the brand’s global division was giving away free ice cream cones in Mexico as a national marketing event. In conjunction with the Promoted Tweet purchase, Guse said, that development helped propel “Dairy Queen” as a trending topic for a significant portion of the day.
Guse said there was no coordination between his company’s promotion in Mexico and the Promoted Tweet purchase. “It was more of just a happy coincidence that both of those things were happening at the same time,” he said.
Craig Key is senior media planner for Space150, a Minneapolis-based digital agency that’s been working with Dairy Queen. He said the brand has added more than 1,500 Twitter followers in the last nine days to bring its total to 14,400. As of mid-afternoon on Thursday, Key said, click activity for “#openingday” had been comparable to the serendipitous response the brand got one week ago.
“Today, the percentage of people clicking is a little lower than it was last week,” he said “But we are still really happy with the results. They are totally strong.”
He added, “And you’ll see there’s competition out there today.”
Indeed, other brands placing a Promoted Tweets bid on “#openingday” on Thursday included Skype, BravesFanatic, and 2K Sports. What company shows up as the Promoted Tweet depends on Twitter’s relevancy algorithm for search results and how much the brand bid for the keywords.
Many companies are choosing to test Promoted Tweets where they are charged by impressions instead of experimenting with Promoted Trends, which reportedly cost more than $70,000 per day as a global purchase. “We didn’t have the budget for this effort to do a Promoted Trend,” Key explained.
Meanwhile, here are two examples of Dairy Queen’s Promoted Tweets for baseball’s Opening Day:
Peanuts, Popcorn, Mini Blizzard® Treats…Wouldn’t that be nice? #openingday http://dq.com/mini 3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply
Baseball, Blizzard®, Baseball, Blizzard®…Words that start with “B” #openingday #subliminaltweetvertising http://dq.com/mini
