Content marketing is an incredibly flexible marketing tool. SMEs, start-ups and family-owned businesses can all benefit from content marketing thanks to its comparatively low cost and ease of implementation, but even the world’s biggest brands can look to engage with their customers and clients through this more active, intimate approach to marketing. McDonald’s is one of the world’s most successful fast food chains, and owes much of its success to innovative marketing – in particular promotional marketing strategies such as the free Happy Meal toys. Even brands of McDonald’s’ magnitude can look to improve, however. Could McDonald’s benefit from a content marketing rethink?
The website
As you’d expect from a company as large as McDonald’s, the company’s website is well designed, prominently features the instantly recognisable red-and-yellow branding and is easy to navigate. UI and UX are strong, and the company has introduced some nice features such as the Great Tastes of America music mini-game. Aside from this, however, the McDonald’s website is surprisingly light on content. There are a few promotions and a little written content referring to the company’s approach to sustainability and sponsorship of young footballers. Coming from a brand such as McDonald’s, however, these efforts come across as tokenistic and even counter-intuitive – a fast food company linked with obesity is not the best corporate sponsor for young footballers. As such, the website copy shows a lack of self-awareness that contemporary online audiences are unlikely to take to kindly. Any real sense of brand identity fails to come across in what little content there is, and one feels that McDonald’s could be doing a lot more with its website in order to engage with potential customers.
The blog
While we’re on the topic of a lack of content, McDonald’s, almost unforgivably, does not have a company blog for customers to engage with. There is a community blog – aimed at company employees and executives – but this is painfully dull and offers little if anything of value to potential customers. It’s extremely surprising that a company of McDonald’s’ size, reach and experience has failed to employ this most fundamental of content marketing tactics, and it’s hardly as though McDonald’s has nothing to write about. Again, the absence of a blog means that the company lacks a concrete brand voice and a means of directly engaging with customers. While competitors are posting engaging content that can help to attract potential customers and build links from other sites, McDonald’s is being left behind. Is it too late for McDonald’s to do something about their web content?
Social media
While McDonald’s might be yet to produce an engaging blog, the company is at least attempting to hold an open conversation with customers via social media. Active Facebook and Twitter profiles are a start, while a tedious Instagram feed heads up the other usual social media suspects. Having an active social media presence is different to having a ‘good’ social media presence, and McDonald’s current attempts to engage customers via such means range from the prosaic to the bewildering. Noting tweets such as ‘20 Chicken McNuggets. Seven sauces. 140 dipping combinations.#Math’ vie with odd Facebook pics, such as the cartoon image captioned ‘You know it’s a McGriddles morning when you’re late for work. Because your GPS has become self-aware and now wants breakfast.’ McDonald’s seems to know that it’s social media approach needs a rethink, and is giving long-time brand ambassador Ronald McDonald a voice via a new Twitter hashtag as of this year. We’re not sure this is quite the change in approach the company needs, however…
Our post-mortem of McDonald’s current approach to content marketing shows that even this enormous global brand has significant room for improvement. Is your company making the most of content marketing or do you, too, have areas in which you can improve? If you’d like to reach out to customers and clients and benefit from a more favourable Google ranking, why not contact the team at Crowdbait today?