By: Connor Agniel, Hayley Alexander, Jake Bryant, Nikolas Presat, Lexi Tocco
AB InBev has been working on their social media marketing for a few years. Their current focus on social media is their fans and connecting with them. Not only are they focused on growing the absolute number of fans, but they want to grow with fans who are truly engaged and interested in their company. Their social media strategy as a company is simple and straight forward; they want to connect themselves with many different fans and grow their social media accounts in order to market to their fans. This is true across all of their different brands. AB InBev wants to branch out to more social media sites such as YouTube in order to create content to help with self-distribution. This stems from their fundamental beliefs are that the consumer is the boss. If they can follow the consumer’s media behavior and entertain the consumer with their different brands and products, then they will be able to succeed as a company.
In 2013, the Ad campaign that AB InBev ran using Bud Light involving Facebook ads gained them SIX times what they spent on the campaign in returns! They found that the campaign got them a 3.3% sales lift among households that saw the ad vs. the control group that did not. “Some 22.8 million U.S. households —20% of the total — were exposed to the campaign.” This is a huge example of how proper use of Social Media marketing can play a major part in furthering a brand and its image. AB InBev is not shy to try to reach their consumers through new methods either. In 2012 they were the first company ever to do a live stream with Pandora, one of the largest music steaming websites of all. Then in 2013, they decided to do another stream with yet another music streaming giant, Spotify, all to try and really reach out to their consumer and connect.
AB InBev has realized that Social Media and digital interaction are huge parts of their consumer’s life, “…our target consumer is engaged with it 24/7/365″(Inside Anheuser…) The hardest part is figuring out the right way to engage with their consumer. To deal with this, AB InBev chooses to interact over “virtually all digital corridors and avenues and offer the consumer choice in how they would like to connect to our brands…” (Inside Anheuser…) They call this strategy “Fans First,” and have used the strategy to connect to over 30 million fans worldwide! AB InBev has different brands on all kinds of Social Media, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and more!
AB InBev has indicated that for their next moves in Social Media marketing, they want to continue to evolve as their customer does. Gaining more followers and continuing to engage with the ones that they already have.
Sources and Learn More:
Bud Light Offers Proof that Facebook Ads Work
http://mashable.com/2013/04/30/bud-light-facebook-ads/ – 20rm2CFM38qW
A-B InBev sports marketing to focus on digital engagement
http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/2015/07/a-b-inbev-sports-marketing-to-focus-on-digital.html
Inside Anheuser-Busch’s Digital Strategy
http://digiday.com/brands/inside-anheuser-buschs-digital-strategy/
How does A-B InBev measure Facebook Success?
http://adage.com/article/digital/a-b-inbev-measure-facebook-success/244526/
A blog created by UMSL Marketing B.A. and MBA students.
