Introduction
This report presents a digital marketing strategy and plan for Shake Shack, an American regional chain of fast-food restaurants. The purpose of the report lies in developing the strategy for addressing the issues revealed during the digital marketing audit of the company. In particular, Shake Shack seemingly struggles with customer engagement and social media content variety, quality, and consistency. As a result, the company has significantly fewer subscribers and comments than a competitor like In-N-Out Burger, another regional chain in the U.S. fast-food industry.
After the social media audit, three practical recommendations for Shake Shack’s digital marketing were formulated. Firstly, the company has to make its social media content more diverse and brand-oriented. Secondly, another round of social media audit should be conducted in order to improve digital marketing efficiency. Lastly, the company should create a content release schedule and adhere to it, thus solving the consistency issue. The path to fulfilling three recommendations is reflected in the sections of the digital marketing plan.
The “Digital Marketing Strategy” section outlines and justifies the selected strategic framework, presenting the elements that Shake Shack should enhance throughout the plan’s implementation. The “Digital Marketing Objectives” section offers a list of SMART goals that should be achieved by implementing the marketing strategy. The “Digital Persona” section contains a demographic, psychographic, and webographic portrait of Shake Shack’s customer. The “Digital Marketing Tools and Tactics” section presents a digital tool optimal for accomplishing the objectives and reaching the digital persona. Finally, the “Additional Considerations” and “Conclusion” sections summarize the digital marketing plan and offer some insight into the success criteria and potential transformations in the digital marketing associated with AI and machine learning.
Likewise to the social media audit, this report relies on publicly available sources of information. For instance, the data on Shake Shack’s customer persona webographics is taken from an open source rather than from corporate sources. Whereas such an approach to drafting a digital marketing plan and strategy is relatively easy and convenient, the strategy created with its assistance would likely require a correction based on the accurate corporate data.
Digital Marketing Strategy
Since Shake Shack is actively using various social media as a tool for customer attraction and retention, it seems logical to use the social media framework as a foundation of the digital marketing strategy. According to Hanlon (2019), the social media framework is based on the four key components:
- Awareness — social media serve as a starting point for reaching potential customers, as they work significantly faster than offline marketing tools. Consequently, social media allow targeting specific customer personas and quickly raising awareness of the product;
- Consideration — the stage where potential customers actively think about the product. Success at the consideration stage can be observed in website traffic, user engagement, messages, or mobile app downloads and installations;
- Conversion — the stage of purchasing the product, which may occur without significant consideration in the digital environment. In the Shake Shack’s case, conversion can happen via online order or a visit to a local restaurant;
- Evangelism — the final stage, which should ideally happen once the conversion stage is over. The name of the stage points to the spread of positive feedback by satisfied customers.
After the social media audit, one can state that Shake Shack has significant issues at the consideration stage of the social media framework. The number of comments to the posts left by Shake Shack’s official accounts on various platforms was consistently low. For instance, the engagement rate — the average number of likes and comments to the posts on Shake Shack’s Instagram, reached only 0,1% (SpeakRJ, 2022a). In contrast, In-N-Out Burger achieved a 1,9% engagement rate (SpeakRJ, 2022b). According to SpeakRJ (2022a), an average engagement rate for an Instagram account with 100,000+ followers should reach 1,7%. A similarly worrying situation can be observed on other platforms. In the case of Twitter, the influence rate of Shake Shack’s account — an average of likes, retweets, and replies by the total number of followers, is bordering 0% (SpeakRJ, 2022c). Therefore, the poor customer engagement in Shake Shack’s social media is not merely an impression but a fact supported by the audit metrics.
Consequently, the digital marketing strategy should be aimed at improving customer engagement rates. The strategy must identify a digital persona of Shake Shack’s customer and deploy a corresponding set of digital marketing tools effective for the engagement of such persona. In addition, a set of SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-related objectives must be created in order to control the strategy implementation process. Shake Shack is likely losing in customer conversion component since the potential customers quickly become bored and disengaged. The digital marketing strategy based on the social media framework would target the weak spot in the customer journey cycle and fix the evident problem.
Digital Marketing Objectives
Since the key problem of Shake Shack’s digital marketing within the social media framework is poor engagement, the digital marketing objectives should be aimed at resolving the associated issues revealed during the social media audit. In particular, the audit spotted the lack of variety, brand identity, and consistency in content posted across the platforms. Opresnik (2018) suggests using the SMART technique for setting meaningful objectives in a digital marketing plan. In the case of Shake Shack, it is possible to set the following digital marketing objectives:
- Shake Shack will communicate brand culture and identity in social media posts. In particular, this goal will be achieved via posting photos and short videos of Shake Shack’s employees, which present the company’s corporate culture in a positive light. Initial target — one post per week on each of the three major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The initial weekly target — 200 likes and 50 comments on the new content type in total;
- Shake Shack will increase customer engagement via interactive activities on social media. New content will include short polls and questions for the audience so that the customers can feel needed and appreciated. Poll/questions can be related to Shake Shack products, and the customers may also be given a chance to win the company’s merch randomly. Initial target — one poll/question per week on each of the three major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and one merch giveaway a month. The initial weekly target — 500 votes and 100 comments in total;
- Shake Shack will demonstrate consistency and willingness to engage the customers by following a regular content upload schedule. New content will be posted on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik-Tok four times a week. Depending on the news, the upload dates may be altered, but the customers will not be left without fresh content regardless of the circumstances.
These objectives may be considered modest, but the current engagement rates on Shake Shack’s social media are even lower. In addition, the numbers can be adjusted depending on the actual results of the plan implementation. Opresnik (2018) advises constant testing of the social media strategy. Recording successes and failures would help understand which methods of customer engagement improvement are more effective. Moreover, since the digital environment works fast, the objectives are expected to change over time as the metrics update, and customer feedback accumulates.
Digital Persona
Selecting a proper set of digital marketing tools and tactics requires creating a digital persona. The term “persona” itself is rather surrealistic in the context of the digital environment. A persona is not similar to a person despite the fact that persona creation is aimed at personalizing the customer journey (de Ruyter, Keeling, and Ngo, p. 201). Therefore, one should consider the digital persona an avatar of the main target audience, a representation of the typical customers.
Each persona is based on elements that define its behavioural patterns. In this regard, a persona is not narrowed down to demographics since it takes customer needs into account (Duda, 2018). According to Hanlon (2019), there are three typical persona elements — demographics, psychographics, and webographics. Demographics represent such details as age, gender, ethnicity, income, and education of an average customer. Psychographics defines personality and emotionally-based behaviours related to buying habits. Finally, webographics demonstrate Internet usage patterns by a typical member of the target customer group (Hanlon, 2019). In Shake Shack’s case, one can apply these elements to construct a digital persona and understand the potential causes of poor customer engagement.
Demographics
Demographics is one of the critical aspects of Shakes Shack’s business model. Unlike many other fast-food chains which promote family leisure and offer special meals for children, Shake Shack positions itself as a more serious entity. The company relies on the adult millennial audience as the main demographic category of customers (Kim and Mauborgne, no date). Therefore, one can assume that an average Shake Shack customer is an adult person in the 25-40 years-old age range with a medium income level and at least a college education. The marital status of Shake Shack’s customers may vary, but the company does not have a personalized approach for children. Overall, Shake Shack occupies a middle ground in demographics — it competes neither against big, family-friendly chains nor against premium-niche restaurants.
Psychographics
Adult millennials have been known for having specific personality traits which affect their consumer behaviour. Munsch (2021) found several distinct themes in the Millennial generation’s attitude to digital marketing. Most importantly, millennials tend to have a short attention span to digital communication — 15 seconds on average. In addition, millennials value emotions in digital marketing, especially humour. Lastly, millennials consider the opinions of social media influencers more authentic and pay more attention to digital advertising if it includes popular music (Munsch, 2021). Shake Shack should recognize these psychographic features of the targeted customer persona and utilize them in digital marketing.
Webographics
The data on Shake Shack’s customer persona webographics is quite limited. However, one can gain a certain insight from the traffic and engagement metrics of the company’s official website. For instance, in March 2022, an average visit reached only 2 minutes and 13 seconds. Over 42% of the visitors viewed only one page before leaving the website. Finally, an average user viewed 4,45 pages before leaving (Similarweb, 2022). Some of these metrics were likely influenced by the author of this report, who spent many hours on Shake Shack’s website and viewed almost all available pages. Otherwise, the webographics are consistent with an adult millennial’s digital persona, associated with a short attention span and a clear wish to get straight to business.
Digital Marketing Tools and Tactics
Considering the features of Shake Shack’s primary digital persona, mobile marketing is a reasonable choice for a main digital marketing tool. Millennials tend to multitask, value influencers’ opinions, and have quite a short attention span; as such, mobile platforms which streamline the consumer experience have a better chance of engaging them. Mobile marketing replaces the old “one size fits all” approach with personalized promotions (Tong, Luo, and Xu, 2020). Adult millennials, who value their time and frequently consume content on the go, will likely be more satisfied by more targeted advertising and meaningful social media content.
One can define three effective mobile marketing tactics aimed at the adult millennial customer persona. Firstly, Shake Shack could use native mobile ads in-feed social — a format that behaves like a regular piece of content and facilitates customer engagement. Secondly, it is possible to deploy native mobile ads in-feed content within editorial fields and on news walls (Hanlon, 2019). This tactic would allow creating a match with website content without forcing the digital persona to spend extra time browsing. As such, the problem of the adult millennials’ short attention span would be mitigated.
Finally, Shake Shack could improve engagement via a branded mobile app that could be used to promote online loyalty programs and online ordering. This tactic would assist in spreading awareness about new products and recent events among loyal customers, who often act as word-of-mouth initiators (Patsiotis, Atik, and Perrea, 2020). In addition, the targeted digital persona would receive personalized treatment from the company, which is valuable in the modern state of digital marketing. Overall, these mobile marketing tactics would reconcile the goal of increasing customer engagement at Shake Shack’s social media platforms with the previously discussed demographics, psychographics, and webographics of the adult millennial customer persona.
As the last notion, Shake Shack could deploy an auxiliary digital marketing tool —content marketing. As a persona-tailored instrument, content marketing is helpful in a multitude of ways — it increases brand visibility, enhances search engine optimization (SEO), and inspires social shares (Hanlon, 2019). In this regard, content marketing would be useful for solving the issue of the relatively poor content quality and variety on Shake Shack’s social media. A combination of mobile and content marketing tools should generate new customers within the prioritized digital persona and retain the current customers who might be at risk of becoming disengaged.
Additional Considerations
Success in implementing the digital marketing strategy will be measured through several metrics. The most obvious ones are the number of likes and comments under the uploads on major social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. An increase in the influence and engagement rates will show that the strategy yields positive results. In addition, Opresnik (2018) suggests looking beyond the popular metrics and evaluating more advanced ones, such as conversion rates. Shake Shack struggles in the customer engagement department, which might hinder the conversion process. Therefore, the progress in customer engagement via mobile and content marketing should be supported by improvements in conversion and financial results.
In regard to the consequences of digital transformation, such as the development of AI and machine learning technologies, one should expect rapid advancements in product personalization. Marketers already can attain in-depth insights into customer behavioural patterns due to recent developments in machine learning and deep-learning algorithms (Tong, Luo, and Xu, 2020). If Shake Shack wants to withstand the competition, adopting AI and digital learning will become necessary in the next three to five years. Otherwise, competing against the restaurant chains, which will be able to attract the customers with the convenient recommendations based on their physical movement trajectory or analyze market trends at incredible speed, would become problematic.
Finally, the spread of AI and machine learning techniques will create certain ethical concerns which must be considered. In particular, cybersecurity and the protection of customers’ personal information will become even more vital than today. Potential data leaks would greatly endanger both customers’ privacy and corporate reputation. Additionally, the companies will have to resist temptation and refrain from the excessive usage of their customers’ data for commercial purposes. Consequently, many business enterprises will face a choice between the utmost protection of customers’ security and the potential financial gains from the competitive advantage. Whereas the former path is undoubtedly right from an ethical standpoint, a danger of some companies preferring the latter option will always be a factor in the future.
Conclusion
The social media audit revealed problems with customer engagement and content variety on Shake Shack’s official accounts. Given this fact, a digital media strategy based on the social media framework was developed. The strategy emphasized improvement in customer engagement rates since poor customer engagement is likely associated with lower conversion rates and subsequent financial losses. The SMART objectives for engagement improvement, digital customer persona, and digital marketing tools and tactics were chosen as the primary strategic elements.
In regard to SMART objectives, the strategy outlines three key directions. Most importantly, Shake Shack should begin communicating corporate culture and identity via uploads on official accounts. Secondly, interactive activities should become a consistent element of customer engagement. Lastly, the content uploading schedule should prevent the loss of connection with the audience. Constant monitoring of customer feedback should be implemented in order to adjust the objectives if the situation demands it.
The selected digital marketing tools are linked to the outlined customer persona — an adult millennial in the 25-40-years-old range. The people who constitute it are characterized by a short attention span, high trust in social media influencers, and the willingness to conduct business quickly. Consequently, the digital strategy deploys mobile and content marketing as the primary tools. The combination of such tactics as native mobile ads, customer engagement via the branded mobile app, and content management should generate new customers within the targeted persona and assist in retaining the current ones.
Finally, Shake Shacks should consider adopting AI and machine learning technologies in the next three to five years. The advancements in these fields can significantly improve the personalization of services, which is highly important for marketing effectiveness. However, the spread of AI and machine learning in marketing would likely result in customer security-related threats, which creates significant technical and ethical challenges for the companies. In particular, the dilemma between potential gains and customer security protection would become critical in the future of marketing.
References
de Ruyter, K., Keeling, D. I., and Ngo, L. V. (2018) ‘When nothing is what it seems: a digital marketing research agenda’, Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ), 26(3), pp. 199-203. doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2018.07.003
Duda, S. (2018) ‘Personas—who owns them’, in von Gizycki, V & Elias, C.A. (eds.) Omnichannel Branding. Springer, pp. 173-191. doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-21450-0_8
Hanlon, A. (2019) Digital marketing: strategic planning & integration. Sage Publications.
Kim, C., and Mauborgne, R. (no date) How Shake Shack flipped the burger restaurant.
Munsch, A. (2021) ‘Millennial and generation Z digital marketing communication and advertising effectiveness: a qualitative exploration. Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science, 31(1), pp. 10-29. doi: 10.1080/21639159.2020.1808812
Opresnik, M.O. (2018) ‘Effective social media marketing planning – how to develop a digital marketing plan’, in Meiselwitz, G. (ed.) Social computing and social media. User experience and behavior. Springer International Publishing AG, pp. 333–341. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-91521-0_24
Patsiotis, A., Atik, M., and Perrea, T. (2020) ‘The influence of m-marketing tools on consumer buying process: evidence from the dining sector’, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 48(10), pp. 1037-1056. doi: 10.1108/IJRDM-06-2018-0109
Similarweb. (2022) Shakeshack.com.
SpeakRJ. (2022a) Shake Shack.
SpeakRJ. (2022b) In-N-Out Burger.
SpeakRJ. (2022c) Shake Shack.
Tong, S., Luo, X., and Xu, B. (2020) ‘Personalized mobile marketing strategies’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(1), pp. 64-78. doi: 10.1007/s11747-019-00693-3
Appendix 1: Digital Marketing Strategy and Plan Canvas
Steps 1 and 2: Strategy and objectives
Step 3: Persona
Step 4: Digital Marketing Tools