Knowing what your audience doesn’t want is equally as critical as knowing what they do want. With audience-first marketing, anticipating audience needs and motivations as well as their aversions is where we always start.
When Jack’s, an Alabama born hamburger joint that’s been a long-time player in southern cuisine, presented GS&F with a menu item that was new to Jack’s but familiar to the plates of southerners, we took an up-close look at the existing and potential customers to inform our strategy.
Reaching an Already Satisfied Customer
Jack’s customers are true southerners through-and-through, and when it comes to food, they know what they want. This also means they stick to what they know and can be wary of updates on old classics. In order to have success, we needed to create a compelling case for these “why fix it if it isn’t broken” consumers to give Jack’s new offering, the Alabama White Sauce Sandwich, a shot.
We first identified the need for trust. In order to increase online orders and get a southerner to try something as classic as an Alabama White Sauce sandwich from Jack’s, we needed to take the risk out and assure the customer that Jack’s delivers on southern authenticity.
The big idea?
“As Alabama as it gets”.
Who better to serve up something as southern as an Alabama White Sauce Sandwich than Alabama natives themselves?
With the ease of ordering online or with the Jack’s app, customers can get their favorite comfort food and guaranteed familiar flavor. By positioning Jack’s Alabama white sauces as “as Alabama as it gets,” we were able to overcome potential consumer concerns when it came to southern authenticity and position Jack’s as a safe bet for homestyle classics.
Gaining Trust With Hometown Heroes
Since we know that influencer marketing tends to have high levels of trust and connection to the everyday Jack’s consumer, we pursued it as our primary form of marketing for the Alabama White Sauce Campaign to push online ordering.
To tap into the pride of southerners and prove to current and prospective customers that Jack’s is the place to get a southern classic they crave, done right, we partnered with three well-known faces of Alabama to serve as talent in our promotion videos. University of Alabama football legend and NFL quarterback AJ McCarron, Miss Alabama 2021 Lauren Bradford, and Southern comedian Matt Mitchell each tried an offering while Jack’s captured their real-time reactions. To drive urgency and route the audience to Jack’s online ordering, we instilled a sense that Jack’s new Alabama white sauce sandwiches are going fast with a CTA that reads “Order yours while the sauce lasts.”
For added value, we repurposed promotional paid content as posts on their social media channels, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. Adjusting the promotional paid content to have a more organic feel for influencer channels proved successful, as influencers consistently showed a notable CTR rate increase compared to other Jack’s posts.
To expand our reach and generate additional campaign content beyond the use of talent influencers, we partnered with three Alabama-based social network influencers—Alyssa Hall, Gabrielle Morris and Heather Brown. They each filmed their own videos, capturing their first-bite experiences, which were amplified on their Instagram pages and repurposed across Jack’s channels.
The results proved that the Jack’s audience resonates most with candid content from trusted thought leaders in the community such as Alyssa Hall, more commonly known as Aly From Alabama. The Jack’s customers didn’t need to be convinced to try an Alabama White Sauce Sandwich, they needed to know Jack’s was the place to easily get their hands on an old classic when the craving arose. With influencer marketing and a keen sense of the Jack’s customers, we were able to help generate demand for Jack’s Alabama White Sauce Sandwich.
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