Paid Social: A Step-up for Success for Burger King

As I mentioned before in my blog about Search Engine Marketing, paying to promote your brand or website can be crucial in getting a rank up in the search engine result page, and getting more people to see your website. However you should beware that people often don't like ads as they are seen as a bother, but a thoughtful high effort ad campaign can generate a lot of growth. A good ad campaign can raise awareness, and mastering Paid Social will give you a Step-up towards Success, and in this article I'll explain why by looking at social media campaigns of Burger King.

What is Paid Social?

Paid Social or Paid Social Media is when a brand pays money to promote their content and reach a wider audience pool on social media. These brands pay money to Social Media giants like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram for them to feature their content to a new targeted audience who could potentially be interested. Unlike Search Engine Marketing, paying to promote your brand on social media is more successful as there is a larger audience pool, as people scroll more on social media than they do the search engine result page. Some examples of Paid Social media are:

• Boosting posts to reach an audience that you struggle to gain organically.
• Promoting products or services through sponsored posts
• Running targeted ad campaigns to reach a specific targeted demographic

Influencer Marketing

Another element of Paid Social Media that is becoming more prominent is Influencer Marketing. Partnering with an influencer can be beneficial for a brand to gain awareness and generate leads. Influencers and content creators are fueled by creativity and loyal audiences, which gives them their success, so partnering with them associates your brand with the influencers brand and their values. The global influencer marketing market has tripled since 2019 and is even estimated to reach a value of $24 billion in 2024. However it's important to note that a successful influencer marketing campaign isn't created from picking the largest influencer, you have to pick someone who fits your brand.

For example, take a look at The General Insurance and their partnership with Shaquille O'Neal. As an Insurance company, The General has to build trust with their audience base so featuring a widely loved and down to Earth celebrity like Shaq in their commercials is successful in building trust. People watching TV would listen to Shaq tell them about Car Insurance, but this wouldn't be the same if The General partnered with a controversial celebrity.

Types of Audiences You Should Know

Before you start pouring money into an ad campaign, you should know finding a target audience isn't as simple as it seems. Specifically looking at Meta Ad Manager (Formerly Facebook Ads), it allows users to pick demographics, locations, and interests of its users, so they can receive the most relevant ads. Meta Ad Manager classifies audience in 3 different types, custom, lookalike, and new audiences.

1. Custom Audience: With Custom Audiences, brands are able to reach people who already have a relationship with your brand which range from anything like being a part of an email list or website visitors. This type of audience is easiest to convert as they have prior knowledge of a brand already
2. Lookalike Audience: A lookalike audience can be defined as a cold audience, and they are built from creating a custom audience but are filled with users who haven't particularly interacted with your brand, but have potential based on shared interests.
3. New Audience: Someone that has had no prior experience or awareness of a brand

Let's Talk About The Paid Social of Burger King

A good way to learn about digital marketing is by looking at examples of real organizations, so let's take a look at the Paid Social of Burger King.

Burger King's ad campaigns have become more recognizable as their commercials have become a meme for their ads constantly playing during commercial breaks for NFL games. The jingle of “Whopper, Whopper, Whopper, Whopper, Junior, Double, Triple Whopper,” has been stuck in a lot of people's heads, and that's because of Burger King's boost in paid advertising. In 2022, Burger King increased it's media advertising expenditures to roughly $500 million. The previous year they had spend $321 million so this is 55.7% increase in paid social media. Similar to other modern brands, Burger King uses humor to increase it's audience liking as well not being afraid to call out other competitors like McDonald's and Wendy's. Burger King's ambition in their guerilla advertising has given them success, but it also has gotten them into controversy, such as their campaign of "Women Belong in the Kitchen," that they featured on International Women's day, which they deleted on Twitter for it's terrible reception.

Alongside other competitors in the Fast Food industry, Burger King has shifted their marketing campaigns to play into memes of their famous Whopper Jingle, featuring different variations of the song. This is essential in converting New and Lookalike audiences into persistent custom audiences, as brand repetition is how you get people down the marketing funnel from awareness all the way to preference. However people get bored of seeing the same stuff all the time, and that's apparent with the Burger King ads, so they could get by with decreasing their advertising budgets for NFL commercial breaks. One important aspect of paid social media to note, is that just because you spend a large budget to advertise, you still have to make content that people would like to genuinely check out.

One Improvement for the King

One way I believe Burger King can take another step up in their journey to success can come from Influencer Marketing. Burger King no longer has a mascot that people can instantly recognize like Wendy's, and they don't have any popular influencer partnerships like McDonald's who have partnered with massive artists such as Travis Scott, BTS, and J Balvin. Burger King has lost awareness as their commercials that everyone would see haven't been seen since last year, but a influencer partnership with someone who's persona matches Burger King's marketing tone might be what they need to get back into the spotlight. Burger King has taken the comedy approach, so a comedian influencer partnership would be the way to go.

This would raise awareness as comedy and influencing has been on a rise with Gen Z and Millennials, and Burger King's advertising caters towards Gen Z and millennials, the two largest demographics on Social Media.