New Hampshire Liquor and Wine Outlet
Digital, Social
Overview
Ongoing brand engagement through healthy head to head competition
The New Hampshire Liquor and Wine Outlets is not only one of the largest retailers in New Hampshire with sales over $700M a year but, as a state-run agency, is an integral contributor to the state’s economy. The state seeks to maximize every dollar for the taxpayers’ benefit. As the agency, wedü knew the social platforms and organic advertising was going to be a key player in driving brand engagement and sales.
Our team created a very customer centric strategy allowing us to engage with customers in a proactive vs. reactive manner. This required very strategic execution of creative social engagement programs. One of the most popular campaigns has become an annual event – meet our version of a March madness event.
Solution
Gamification of consumer brand loyalty
One program started early in our engagement with NHLC is the Wine and Spirits Madness initiative. Kicking off as a way to engage customers to support their favorite products, this program has grown from a simple bracket on Facebook to a fully integrated campaign that includes social media, email, a microsite and in-store promotion. With a full series of voting brackets, leading wines are pitted against each other in competition after competition, until the final wine victor is ready to face off with a similarly selected spirit winner. The program has evolved as the social networks have changed to include not just voting with a comment, but with a live feed stream, a poll on Instagram stories, in 2020 a build your own bracket component that entered customers to win a store gift card was introduced and in 2021 that bracket was enhanced and led to a significant increase in participants.
Outcome
Increased engagement year over year
Engagements on social media sky-rocket during the Madness Competition and saw a 427% increase in engagement on Facebook alone: Throughout the 3-week promotion we saw upwards of 40,000 engagements. In addition to the engagement growth, the new bracket microsite helped grow the email list with a group of highly engaged wine and spirits fans. The build your bracket microsite was promoted with in-store posters and saw nearly 30,000 visitors and had 2,021 entries. Our bracket goal was initially 1,100, which would have been a 10% increase over 2020, but we reached that in the first week! Despite not being eligible for the grand prize after the first week, we still saw a steady stream of brackets being completed throughout the program. The updated bracket was also able to live on our Tasting Room for ideal branding.
Adding the posters in-store not only drove additional engagement from people who may not follow us on social media, but it also gave us another way to promote the 16 products included in the competition when consumers are ready to purchase.
Oh and if you were on the edge of your seat wondering, Tito’s Handmade Vodka won the title this year!
Key Performance Indicators
- Reach: Over 3,000,000 Consumers
- 40,000 Votes
- Bracket Capture: 2,021