Coca-Cola is a brand that reeks of reinvention, creativity, and innovation. Coca-Cola was first created by John Pemberton in 1886, who started by selling nine servings of the drink every day.
Fast forward to 2022, and 9 servings are now 1.9 billion servings, and Coca-Cola is a brand that every person knows in every corner of the world. Now that’s something beyond our imagination!
A lot of credit for Coca-Cola’s growth is due to its mind-blowing and out-of-the-world marketing campaigns. Even in the existence of strong competitors, their marketing campaigns are what sets them apart from the crowd. With the advent of digital marketing, Coca-Cola has not shunned away and has brought its A-game to this platform.
Muhtar Kent (Muhtar), Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, envisioned ‘Vision 2020‘ to quadruple the company’s revenue while also launching many sustainable programs to help ‘shed the arrogance of the 128-year-old legacy. At the same time, Muhtar expanded social media spending from 3% of overall media spending in 2006 to 30% in 2013 to facilitate communication with consumers, particularly Millennials, and match their expectations.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the different digital marketing strategies by Coca-Cola and share a pdf of how they have managed to become a star player on social media too. Before we jump on to their strategy, let’s understand more about Coca-Cola and its beginnings.
About Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola claims to be more than just a beverage company; they’re a family of 7,00,000 employers, 225+ bottling partners, and consumers across 200 countries. A local pharmacist, Dr John Stith Pemberton, carried the elegant bottle of Coca-Cola in the streets of Atlanta selling the delicious and refreshing drink to an average of nine people daily.
Today, the bottle sits on the racks of stores on every street store worldwide. The name Coca-Cola was coined by Frank M. Robinson, who swore that two C’s would work better than one (another marketing lesson to learn, isn’t it).
Coca-Cola Logo Evolution
The very first Coca-Cola logo was designed by the accountant of the company name Frank Robinson.
As time passed and the company expanded, targeting a diversified audience, it continued developing its marketing strategy & evolved the logo to the best till today.
Why should marketers study Coca-Cola’s digital marketing strategies?
Customers have started demanding increasingly personalised, relevant, targeted marketing messages. If brands miss the mark in such situations, they risk losing their customers. Real-time digital marketing offered bigger rewards but at the cost of higher risks and more difficult execution. Coca-Cola has so far been successful in its digital adventure, one that marketers can learn from.
Here are some things marketers can learn from Coca-Cola:
1. Engaging directly with fans
Coca-Cola always engages directly with their customers and creates campaigns around emotions and what people truly care about. One example is Coca-Cola’s #VerdaderoAmigo ad campaign, which celebrates friendship, unity, and team building. They launched this campaign to fight against cyberbullying and the cruelty, loneliness, and isolation it brings.
They redesigned their iconic ribbon with a fist bump symbol to showcase their idea.
This campaign to highlight “true friendship” was supported by three films that stood against social cruelty. It urged teenagers to identify and value true friendships and avoid cruelty.
2. Targeting millennials – Age & Generation
Coca-Cola creates campaigns and uses technologies that appeal to the new generation and remind them that Coca-Cola is everything they love!
After identifying teenagers as their target audience, they’re making strategies that act like teen magnets.
But they never miss any chance to go beyond and amaze the new set of audience by promoting on multiple channels including TV, online ads, and sponsorships.
Some of Coca-Cola’s most well-known sponsorships include NASCAR, NBA, American Idol, the Olympics, and, FIFA, which are the point of attraction for varied age groups.
3. Personalising
The famous “Share a Coke” campaign that was launched globally came to India with a personalised version. Coke’s logo was replaced with words like ‘Papa’ ‘Didi,” and ‘Bhai’ so the Indian audience could relate to it. The Share a Coke commercial campaign was launched in India in 11 Indian languages. The television commercial, created by advertising agency McCann India, shows two young men standing by each other in difficult circumstances and celebrating their relationship over a ‘Share a Coke’ unique PET bottle with the word ‘Bhai’. The idea is those good friends are just as important as family.
Coca-Cola’s digital marketing strategies
Coca-Cola’s social media marketing strategies & Case Study
Coca-Cola’s social media strategies focus on engaging directly with its customers and establishing relationships. We will discuss how Coca-Cola used different social media platforms to grab a majority over its competitors. Let’s look at an overview of how they are performing on different social media platforms:
| Platform | No. of followers |
| 141k followers | |
| 108M followers | |
| 26K followers | |
| YouTube | 3.77M subscribers |
Coca-Cola’s Instagram Marketing Strategies
Coca-Cola is a globally recognized brand, and its Instagram page has 141k fans, which is not surprising given its size and popularity. They have a separate page for Coca-Cola India. They put up posts approximately once a day and have very low engagement. Because Coca-Cola doesn’t have its stores, its social media marketing strategy isn’t centred on bringing people to its stores or an e-commerce platform; rather, it’s all about maintaining brand image and growing awareness of its advertising campaigns compared to other companies.
They have recently posted content with Kriti Sanon, a popular Bollywood actress. By collaborating with a Bollywood actress to reach out to Indians, they’re selling a product less consumed than its other products, Coke Zero.
They also post many engagement posts. These posts urge their audience to comment and hence engage with them. A recent post urges their audience to comment on three things that make their “coke table perfect.”
What is Coca-Cola’s Instagram Engagement Rate?
Coca-Cola’s Instagram engagement rate is 0.16%, and it receives an average of 189 likes and 8 comments on its posts.
Coca-Cola’s Facebook marketing strategies
Coca-Cola is a globally recognised brand, and its Facebook page has 109 million fans, which is not surprising given its size and popularity. However, if you look at its Facebook page, you’ll notice that it doesn’t have as frequent daily updates as other brands like Red Bull. Coca-Cola goes more than a week without making a public announcement.
Because Coca-Cola doesn’t have its stores, its social media marketing strategy isn’t centred on bringing people to its stores or an e-commerce platform; rather, it’s all about maintaining brand image and growing awareness of its advertising campaigns compared to other companies. Participation is really low, with only a few thousand likes on average.
Like Instagram, Coca-Cola has a separate page for India to post content concentrated on Indians with over 141k followers. Coca-Cola posted a contest on Facebook that promises to give away gifts. However, the terms and conditions of the contest go on and on and on…
Coca-Cola’s Twitter marketing strategies
Coca-Cola India has more than 26K followers on Twitter and tweets regularly, making it a fairly active brand. It also features sections dedicated to certain goods and sub-brands, such as diet coke, coke zero, etc. The company’s social media team rarely sends direct marketing messages, preferring to respond to @mentions on Twitter. It answers many complaints, requests, compliments, and other demands.
However, not all mentions are responded to; many go unanswered, but this is a wonderful tactic instead of sending out commercial messages. Unlike their regular Coca-Cola page, their diet coke page has a different approach and is primarily used for tweeting marketing messages, asking questions, and other similar activities.
Twitter Analytical History & Case Study for Coca-Cola
This analytical graph shows the growth of Coca-Cola’s follower count over the past decade on Twitter. You can see that the follower count has exponentially growing and it’s likely that this will keep growing. Cola is using Twitter to engage with the audience very strategically & it helps the company to gain traction & grow.
Coca-Cola’s YouTube marketing strategies
Coca-Cola has over 3.77 million subscribers on YouTube. They carry out their campaigns and post videos for all their audiences worldwide. In contrast to the other social media accounts, YouTube does not have a separate channel for its Indian audience. They post all their campaigns on the same channel.
Here are some of their most viral uploads on Instagram:
All these videos have reached a massive audience, with the maximum of 127 million views. The videos curated are short, quick, and fun to watch. By making these snackable videos, they can get a wider audience.
Coca-Cola’s SEO Strategies
Coca-Cola has a domain authority score of 55, a rather impressive number, and gets organic search traffic of 55.5k.
The following are the top five organic keywords for Coca-Cola’s website:
Here’s how an effective SEO strategy helped Coca-Cola;
- Most of the traffic to the company’s website was organic, contributing to a new high of over 4 million visits.
- Coca-Cola’s organic search built a reputation as one of the most effective drivers of customer traffic, interaction, and media exposure.
Coca-Cola’s Top Marketing Campaigns
1. Share A Coke
Share A Coke is a public awareness campaign for Coca-Cola. The initiative began in Australia and New Zealand in 2011, using 250 of the most popular millennial names to promote items to specific consumers and raise brand awareness internationally.
The corporation urged its customers to share a coke with a friend with the same name. As soon as people started posting the campaign images on social media, they went viral. This campaign quickly extended to 70 nations and was a huge success.
From June to July of 2014, more than 125,000 social media posts mentioned the share a coke campaign, according to the Wall Street Journal. The search term “Share a Coke” has seen a considerable spike in Google searches in the United States over the last three months.
In terms of Facebook, the corporate page gained 39% more followers and 870% more visitors. This campaign succeeded because the corporation returned to its roots by bringing people together and fostering friendship. Another reason it worked was that labelling the bottles with names gave them a personal touch.
2. The Hppiness Machine!
The Happiness Machine Campaign was a component of the global integrated campaign Open Happiness and is one of Coca-most Cola’s popular marketing initiatives. This campaign aimed to convey joy and unexpected experiences to customers.
Coca-Cola vending machines with hidden cameras were put in various locations throughout numerous countries. They documented the campaign for two days and produced a video of the participants’ reactions to receiving free coke or other items like sunglasses, flowers, etc.
Customers needed to interact with the machines in various amusing and unusual ways to receive a free Coke, such as embracing a machine in Singapore, dancing to K-pop in South Korea, and singing a Christmas carol in Sweden.
The thrilled participants’ reactions were captured and disseminated on various platforms as a series of films. The films went viral on YouTube, garnering millions of views and reinforcing Coca-reputation Cola’s as a company that spreads happiness.
3. Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola launched “Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola” in 2003, becoming one of the company’s most successful campaigns. Prasoon Joshi, one of India’s most renowned advertisers, created the ad campaign. Aamir Khan starred in the series.
So, when you’re craving a cool refreshing drink or Thanda, Coca-Cola is the first thing that springs to mind. This is a wonderful method to re-establish Coca-Cola as a cool, refreshing drink for kids and adults alike. This ad expanded the Coke TG from the initial young to the public. This was the first attempt to break through barriers and portray Coke as The Cool Drink for Everyone.
Here is one of the ads from their series with Amir Khan
Coca-Cola Recent Finance Report
Coca-Cola Company recently reports earnings for the third quarter of 2022. It shows the company’s net revenues grew by 10% to $11.1 billion & organic revenue (Non-GAAP) grew by 16% compared to previous quarter.
Along with the quarterly report, the company issued its fourth quarter, and next year’s considerations.
Conclusion
As you can see, Coca-Cola has made inroads into the internet realm to market its products and brand. Want to make such killer strategies too?
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Which is your favourite campaign by Coca-Cola? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Thanks for reading & Cheers to Coca-Cola!
