The Shake Shack Firm’s Digital Marketing Audit

Topics: Auditing, Digital Marketing, Marketing Words: 1936 Pages: 6

Executive Summary

In this digital audit marketing report, I have applied the 7Cs framework to Shake Shack, an American chain of fast-food restaurants. I focused on revealing strengths and weaknesses in the following aspects: corporate culture, convenience, competition, communications and content, consistency, communication, and customer journey. I have examined Shake Shack’s accounts on various social media platforms in order to draw informed conclusions and compose a list of practical recommendations for addressing the potential weaknesses.

In the audit process, I found that Shake Shack is in a healthy condition in terms of corporate culture, convenience, customisation, and customer journey. However, the audit revealed serious warning signs regarding communications, content, and consistency. In particular, Shake Shack seemingly cannot engage the audience with interesting content, mainly posting food imagery on its accounts. Consequently, the company has significantly fewer subscribers and comments than such competitors as In-N-Out Burger. In addition, the content is released inconsistently, with significant breaks in the schedule.

Therefore, I would recommend three steps to the Shake Shack’s marketing department. First of all, the company should make social media content more diverse and focus on brand identity development instead of excessive food imagery posting. Secondly, Shake Shack should conduct an audit and determine which platforms should be prioritised. Lastly, content on any remaining social media should be aligned with a mission and come out on a consistent schedule.

Introduction

This report contains a digital marketing audit of Shake Shack, an American regional chain of fast-food restaurants. The purpose of the audit lies in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of Shake Shack’s current approach to digital marketing and providing justified recommendations. The audit utilises the 7Cs framework aimed at a comprehensive analysis of digital marketing. In particular, the aspects of corporate culture, convenience for consumers, competition, communications, content, consistency, and the customer journey were examined. A fundamental limitation of such an audit technique is the reliance on publicly available sources of information.

Shake Shack operates in a highly competitive fast-food industry, which adds to the importance of marketing as a competitive advantage. Company restaurants, the Shacks, offer burgers, hot dogs, shakes, crinkle cut fries, and various beverages. As of December 29, 2021, the company operated 369 Shacks in the United States and internationally. Shake Shack currently has 9,695 full-time employees, which makes it a sizeable organisation (Yahoo!Finance, 2022). Overall, Shake Shack is in a healthy situation, but potential improvements in digital marketing may be needed to achieve an extra advantage.

Digital Marketing Audit

Corporate Culture

Corporate culture can be defined as an organisation’s personality its core values. Various classifications of corporate cultures exist — for instance, Groysberg et al. (2018) described eight possible styles, depending on core concepts: purpose, caring, order, safety, results, authority, enjoyment, and learning. The information about Shake Shack’s values, the cornerstone of the corporate culture, is readily available on the home page of the company’s website. Above anything else, Shake Shack strives to “stand for something good”; in particular, the company claims that “our people are the core of who we are and what we stand for” (Shake Shack, no date). Therefore, the corporate culture of Shake Shack can be described as caring.

Convenience

The convenience aspect of Shake Shack’s digital marketing depends on what information the customer seeks. For instance, one can easily make an online order on Shake Shak’s website — the “Order Now” button can be located instantly. A customer can quickly check the ingredients of any product, look at the image, place an order and choose whether to arrange delivery or pick up an order themselves. Filing a form or complaint is also relatively easy — one only has to scroll to the bottom of the home page and click the “Contact Us” link. In addition, one can send a message via one of the various Shake Shack’s social media. However, finding and downloading the documents is more complicated — one has to guess that the necessary information is hidden behind the “Investors” link. Overall, Shake Shack offers a convenient experience in placing orders, but access to other information is more difficult.

Competitor analysis

In regard to competition, it would be just to analyse another U.S-based regional chain of fast-food restaurants. In-N-Out Burger occupies the 45th spot in the top 500 U.S. restaurants in terms of financial results, whereas Shake Shack is located in 71st place (Restaurant Business, 2021). Its approach to digital marketing is somewhat different from Shake Shack. Shake Shack is present on all popular social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube in addition to the website and corporate blog. Meanwhile, In-N-Out Burger is only present on Facebook and Instagram, which keeps the target audience concentrated. For example, the difference in the number of Facebook subscribers is staggering: 2,761,922 versus 428,077 in favour of In-N-Out Burger. Kingsnorth (2019) states that it is crucial for a company to get its social personality right. In this regard, In-N-Out Burger outperforms Shake Shack, as it creates a powerful, romantic identity related to “good old America” — images of muscle cars, beautiful suburban landscapes, and cozy In-N-Out Burger restaurants (Appendix 1). The weakness of such an approach lies in suboptimal suitability for the global markets, but this issue is much less relevant for the regional restaurant chain.

Communications and Content

Shake Shack communicates with the audience via a large variety of social media. In addition to the official website, the company has a Twitter account (97,000 followers), a Facebook account (428,077 subscribers), an Instagram account, a TikTok account (90,3 thousand subscribers), and a YouTube account (3,24 thousand subscribers). At first glance, such a variety seems to be a good sign; however, a closer examination reveals significant issues with content and customer engagement.

Almost all content on official Shake Shack social media accounts is related to food images, not interaction with the people or brand identity promotion. While Aljukhadar, Poirier, and Senecal (2020) found that aesthetic value is associated with customers’ inspiration, the excess of such content may make the customers bored. The conversations under Shake Shack’s social media posts rarely have a few dozen comments, whereas In-N-Out Burger’s posts regularly gather hundreds. Shake Shack’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are updated once in a few days, and the YouTube channel has not been updated in a month. Shake Shack attempts to communicate on five different social media platforms but fails to provide the customers with interesting content.

Consistency

Consistency in digital marketing can be divided into two categories. Firstly, consistency implies the same tone of voice and same patterns in the use of imagery. Secondly, consistency is related to the release schedule, so the audience could reliably expect new content and stay engaged. In regard to the first category, Shake Shack does a decent job — the content across all platforms has a similar use of food imagery combined with text written in a positive, friendly tone. Appendix 2 provides an example of such imagery from one of the recent Twitter posts.

However, Shake Shack lacks consistency in content release dates. For instance, posts on Twitter can appear on back-to-back dates, like on March 14 and March 15, 2022, or there can be no posts in three days (Shake Shack, 2022a). A similar situation can be seen on Facebook — there is a five-day gap between the last and second to last posts (Shake Shack, 2022b). In this regard, Shake Shack should consider improving the consistency of the content release schedule.

Customisation

Customisation can be understood as customers’ ability to tailor the experience to their preferences. The tools for customisation are provided by the company in the form of personalisation. On Shake Shack’s website, a customer can create a personal account to receive information about the marketing news and new products (Shake Shack, no date). In addition, a customer can combine an order from all available products — burgers, drinks, crinkle cut fries, and many others. All products have a good-quality image and detailed test description that includes a list of ingredients where applicable (Shake Shack, no date). Lastly, a customer can choose whether to arrange home delivery or pick up their order in the Shack of choice. The same degree of customisation is available in the official Shake Shack mobile app. Overall, Shake Shack provides solid personalisation tools which can be used for experience customisation.

Customer Journey

Regarding customer journey in the online environment, Shake Shack offers sufficiently convenient conditions. The company’s official website is informative — the services that an average customer might look for are easy to find. For example, one can quickly place an order and arrange delivery or pickup. In addition, a customer can send complaints or ask questions via the message form on the website or Shake Shack’s social media accounts. Overall, Shake Shack’s digital infrastructure is capable of ensuring a smooth customer journey. However, one should not disregard potential issues with personnel responsiveness, which may be detrimental to overall customer satisfaction.

Justifications for Having a Digital Marketing Strategy Model or Framework

Given the information revealed during the audit, Shake Shack should consider implementing the social media framework for a digital marketing plan. The company is already engaged in communication via various social media. This choice is reasonable since the target audience of any business is likely to use social media (Kingsnorth, 2019). However, Shake Shack has certain issues with content quality and audience engagement — their efforts are wide in scale but relatively shallow in depth and creativity. The social media framework would help in solving these issues. In particular, the social media framework will help to decide which social media should be prioritised, which ones are irrelevant, and what content adjustments would improve the customer’s engagement.

Recommendations

Based on the digital marketing audit of Shake Shack, it is possible to provide the following practical recommendations:

Shake Shack should make its social media content more diverse and interesting. Food imagery from the official website is quite informative (Appendix 3). Therefore, the company should stop posting so much food imagery on social media platforms and focus on developing an attractive, engaging brand identity;
A social media audit should be conducted in order to determine, which accounts are irrelevant, and which ones should be prioritised. Each of the remaining social media platforms must have a clear mission and purpose, and there is no shame in drawing inspiration from the competitors (Opresnik, 2018). The audience activity is already poor enough to spread the resources thin.
Shake Shack should adhere to a consistent content release schedule regardless of which social media platforms remain active. One can hardly imagine that nothing interesting is happening in such a big company in five days. However, Shake Shack’s Twitter and Facebook accounts have allowed such pauses between content release dates.

Conclusion

A digital marketing audit of Shake Shack revealed several positive and negative tendencies. On the positive side, the company provides convenient access to functionality that might interest an average customer, such as online orders and feedback channels. In addition, Shake Shack declares allegiance to the principles of caring corporate culture and offers decent personalisation, which is vital for experience customisation and a smooth customer journey.

However, the condition of Shake Shack’s social media accounts creates certain concerns. Shake Shack fails to produce engaging content and promote its brand despite having accounts on all major platforms. It is evident from the low number of comments and subscribers compared to competitors, such as In-N-Out Burger. Shake Shack also lacks consistency in terms of content schedule release. Therefore, the company should implement the social media framework to divert resources from irrelevant platforms and improve the overall variety and quality of social media content.

References

Aljukhadar, M., Poirier, A. B., & Senecal, S. (2020). ‘Imagery makes social media captivating! Aesthetic value in a consumer-as-value-maximiser framework’, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 14(3), pp. 285-303.

Groysberg, B., Lee, J., Price, J., & Cheng, J. (2018). ‘The leader’s guide to corporate culture’, Harvard Business Review, 96(1), pp. 1-15.

Kingsnorth, S. (2019) Digital marketing strategy: an integrated approach to online marketing. Kogan Page.

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.

Restaurant Business. (2021) In-N-Out Burger. Web.

Shake Shack. (no date) Our values. Web.

Shake Shack (2022a) [Facebook] Web.

Shake Shack (2022b) [Twitter] Web.

Yahoo!Finance. (2022) Shake Shack Inc. (SHAK). Web.